Vinchin Backup & Recovery 8.1: What's New?

As we conclude 2024, we’re excited to release the final update of Vinchin Backup & Recovery for the year. This version extends workload support to include Huawei Cloud ECS and S3 Objects, introducing enhanced backup and disaster recovery features. Previously limited to VMware, our VM backup verification now applies to all workloads in the system. New advanced features include Job Orchestration, Native Backup Data Verification, a Built-in Disaster Recovery Lab, and Tape Library support.

We’ve also optimized a range of functionalities, including improvements in features of VMware backup, ZStack backup, Server CDP, Exchange backup, and User interface improvements, to make it more user-friendly and adaptable across more scenarios.

Newly-added S3 Objects Protection

S3 storage is widely used by organizations to store critical data involving massive files and folders, all of which need secure protection, and Vinchin now can help you to backup the essential data in S3 storage.

Adding Infrastructure: Integrating S3 storage with Vinchin Backup & Recovery is straightforward. Simply input credentials like the node endpoint, access key ID, and secret access key to add it easily.

Backup Strategies: In the 4-step backup wizard, you can easily select the backup source, backup destination and backup strategies for S3 protection jobs. For the backup strategies, most of Vinchin’s currently support strategies are supported. Vinchin now supports full, incremental, and differential backup for S3 data backup. Backup features include data compression, data encryption, throttling policy, retention policy, etc.

Data Recovery: Vinchin supports object-level data restore, allowing you to restore S3 data to its original location or redirect it to alternative destinations like file servers or NAS.

Fast Speed: With multithreaded file transfer for large files and speed acceleration for small files, Vinchin’s S3 Objects backup is faster than other alternatives.

Newly-added Huawei Cloud ECS Protection

Huawei Cloud ECS instance is the cloud server provided by Huawei, hosted on Huawei Cloud. With this update, Vinchin introduces support for Huawei ECS instances protection. 

Adding Infrastructure: Similar to other integrations, just use your access key ID and secret access key to add Huawei ECS as a protected environment.

Backup Strategies: For ECS protection, Vinchin supports both instance-level and volume-level backups. For the backup strategies, most of Vinchin’s currently support strategies are supported. Vinchin now supports full, incremental, and differential backup strategies. Backup features include data compression, data encryption, multi-threaded transmission, throttling policy, retention policy, etc.

Data Recovery: When you restore ECS instance from backups, Vinchin also supports both volume-level or instance-level restore. 

V2V Migration: Vinchin supports C2V/V2C migrations between Huawei Cloud and other virtual platforms supported by Vinchin.

New Built-in Disaster Recovery Lab

As a disaster recovery solution vendor, we are devoted to facilitate a convenient disaster recovery progress and this time we are introducing an internal DR platform, which allows you to verify the validity of backup data of all virtualizations supported by Vinchin and allows for instantly disaster recovery with embedded KVM virtual platforms in Vinchin Backup & Recovery.

Native Backup Data Verification: It is firstly introduced in Vinchin in 2022, supporting only VMware at that time and now it extends to all virtualizations supported by Vinchin.

Built-in Disaster Recovery Lab: This means Vinchin can realize instant VM recovery within Vinchin’s embedded KVM virtualization when disaster strikes, no need to use external virtualization platforms.

New Tape Library Support

Tape remains a popular, cost-effective medium for long-term storage. Now, Vinchin supports both physical and virtual tape libraries as backup storage options, allowing you to store backups on a reliable, long-lasting medium.

New Job Orchestration

Now, you can create a job to automatically copy the backup data to another location or automatically verify the backup data validity after backup jobs, which requires another job set in the previous version.

Enhanced Vinchin Features

We’ve made some improvements across several Vinchin features to enhance performance and usability:

VMware Backup: Now the scanning speeding of VMware is optimized, making VMs of large environment adding more smoothly.

ZStack Backup: Now the backup strategy for ZStack is improved by adding taking/deleting storage snapshot during the whole progress to faster transmit data. Another optimized point is to allow for creating tenant accounts to let the tenant backup their VMs.

Server CDP: Adding Auto-failover switch and Breakpoint resume switch, now you can manually disable failover in a server CDP job when you need to shut down the protected workload.

Exchange Backup: Now Vinchin supports backup copy (onsite and offsite) and backup archive (to cloud) for Exchange.

Optimized User Interface: Now the interface is optimized to help you better manage the backup system.