VMware is the leading virtualization platform supplier. Many companies choose its products as their cloud solutions.
Virtual machines are the important parts of a virtual environment because many business systems are running on them. To protect data on VMs from unexpected loss, making a backup is the best solution. VMware knows users' needs, so they add the feature, backup and restore, in their products.
What is VMware Data Recovery (VDR)?
VMware Data Recovery is the part of vSphere suite. It helps users backup virtual machine data on a simple interface. After several updates, VMwave announces that VDR is not supported with vSphere 5.1 and higher.
What is vSphere Data Protection (VDP)?
vSphere Data Protection is the replacement of VMware Data Recovery. After vSphere Data Protection serves as part of vSphere suite for several versions, on April 5, 2017, again VMware announces the abandon of vSphere Data Protection. VMware vSphere 6.5 is the last release that includes vSphere Data Protection. This time, it doesn't indicate the successive product after the End of Availability (EOA) of VDP.
According to VMware, after the study of customers' feedback, vSphere Data Protection can't meet the need of customers, who prefer a solution for software-defined data center. VMware doesn't indicate that they would release a new product for this need, but they intend to focus on the research and development of VMware vSphere Storage APIs - Data Protection to support the relative solution suppliers, so users need to find a VDR/VDP alternative.
What can VMware Data Recovery do?
VMware Data Recovery is like a plugin of vSphere. You need to download the package from VMware and install it on the machine where vSphere Client is installed. After that, you need to use the OVF template to deploy a virtual machine for later data backup. When you visit this virtual machine, you would be automatically navigated to where you could backup and restore your virtual machines.
Technically, VMware Data Recovery is a quite simple and good backup solution. Simple as it is, it still has some advanced features like Changed Block Tracking (CBT), agentless backup, data deduplication, etc.
It also has some disadvantages. As it is simple, there are not enough advanced features like other applications. It may be acceptable for small business but if the IT environment is large, other solutions specialized for large-scale virtualization protection would be better.
What can vSphere Data Protection do?
vSphere Data Protection is the official replacement of VMware Data Recovery. VMware has released a tool to help users migrate VDR backups so that they would be still available with VDP.
Succeeding VMware Data Recovery, vSphere Data Protection does almost everything that VMware Data Recovery does. Compared with VMware Data Recovery, it is more robust and convenient.
vSphere Data Protection is integrated with vCenter, so you don't have to create another virtual machine for backup. To create a backup task, you just need to use vSphere Client.
It is the upgraded VMware Data Recovery, but it still has some disadvantages. Users complain that the GUI is slow, backup strategy is not flexible enough, etc. The biggest disadvantage is still that it is not suitable for large business.
User's cloud environment is expanding so that a comprehensive and centralized backup solution would be more suitable. Maybe that's why VMware give up the internal backup solution and turn to support other backup solution suppliers.
What would be an alternative for VDR/VDP?
Technically, a good alternative for VMware Data Recovery or vSphere Data Protection should cover almost all of their features so that users could basically backup and restore as they need. Furthermore, it could be accepted by both small business and large business.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a very professional virtual machine backup solution. Except features for basic backup and restore, it also has many advanced features built in for both small business and large business.
Agentless Backup: Vinchin Backup & Recovery could directly interact with the hypervisor layer and it supports agentless backup on up to 11 virtualization platforms including VMware, oVirt, Hyper-V, etc.
Instant Recovery: To effectively recover your business from downtime, you could shorten the RTO to 15s with Vinchin Backup & Recovery.
Cross-platform migration: To manage heterogeneous virtual environment, Vinchin Backup & Recovery would help you easily migrate VM between different platforms.
Deduplication and compression: Vinchin Backup & Recovery would help you save many storage resources by data deduplication and compression, working to reduce the backup data size by at least 60%.
Changed Block Tracking (CBT): CBT technology would help you largely speed incremental backup to let you save a lot of time.
Flexible backup strategy: Your backup strategy would be fully under your control. No matter full backup, incremental backup, or differential backup, daily, weekly, or monthly, just make your own strategy with Vinchin Backup & Recovery.
Centralized control: No matter your IT infrastructure is run for a small business or a large business, all backup and restore jobs of your servers and virtual machines could be monitored and protected on one console.
Want to try Vinchin Backup & Recovery? Just send an application and start a 60-day full-featured trial.
Sum Up
VMware has released VMware Data Recovery and vSphere Data Protection to help users backup their virtual machines but at last, they abandon them because users want a more comprehensive backup solution. They decide to encourage other backup solution suppliers instead, by providing related APIs for third-party backup software to offer more powerful data protection that most VMware users really need.
Under this circumstance, Vinchin Backup & Recovery can be a good alternative because as specialized backup software for VMs, it covers most of the basic features of VMware Data Recovery and vSphere Data Protection and also provides more advanced features that users need. Just simply deploy it in minutes to refresh your VMware backup experience.
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