I got an opportunity to work with Altaro VM Backup solution for VMware and like to share my experience with this product.
Altaro is fast-growing developer of user-friendly backup solutions for companies, IT resellers and MSPs and their flagship solution is Altaro VM Backup. It is a fast, high performance backup and replication solution for virtualized environment offerings for VMware as well as Hyper-V. So, let’s dive right into it.
Installation:
3 Step process.
Yes, you read it right. It is super easy and quick to install Altaro VMBackup software. Menu and installation process is self-explanatory and very easy to follow.
Deployment/User Interface:
I have worked with different backup solution and one thing I disklike about most is too many menus and clustered interface. But Altaro has well thought UI and is clutter free with interactive drag drop option. I was able to configure my first VM backup in couple of minutes without following any guides.
All backup destinations are listed on one side menu with easy to configure setup.
Backup Locations
You can take backup directly to your choice of cloud providers. Out of Box, integration with major cloud providers such as Azure and AWS is supported. All you need is access to cloud storage account, connectivity and rest can be easily accomplished by Altaro itself.
In addition to have an Offsite Copy Location on the Cloud, one can also setup Onsite CDP which will allow continuous backup to be taken as frequently as 5 minutes. This helps in achieving very strict RPO SLAs with very less complex design.
Backup Size and Storage Saving:
Altaro uses Augmented In-Line Deduplication. Augmented In-line Deduplication is a space saving technology developed by Altaro Software that ensures that common blocks of data, both in a singular VMs data and across multiple VMs globally, are transferred and stored on the backup location once. This deduplication technology stands out from others as it uses variable block size for maximum efficiency and also offer in-line cross-VM deduplication – so that means no need for post-process deduplication.
Disaster Recovery:
There is another protection of Replication is present in tool itself.
Consider a scenario, you have complete site failure and business doesn’t allow for large RPO or RTO. Setup AOS offsite server and configure replication. In case of disaster scenario like above, VM can be booted instantly on second site saving RPO/RTO SLAs.
There is another nifty feature called Boot from Backup which allows you to instantly boot any VM version directly from the backup locations. This can drastically reduce RTO and provide adherence to very strict RTO service level agreements.
Altaro’s Sandbox feature takes the worry out of recovery by verifying the integrity of selected backups. Along with checking the data stored in backups, it clones VM backups to the same host to make sure they will boot when needed – and it does this all in the background.
Verdict:
Excellent value, simple configuration, easy deployment and a lot of features built into product itself.
The drag and drop console design make it easy to create backup strategies for VMs and built in replication and offsite restoration option provide for more feature than what it is worth for. Protecting VM on ESXi cannot get easier than this.
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