Data is an important part of any business today. Any human errors or natural disasters may result in irreversible damage to your VMware virtual machines, and you can’t predict what will happen to your VMs in the next second. It’s risky to run all workloads on a virtual machine without backup.
You need an effective VMware backup solution to protect your virtual environment and gain the ability to quickly protect and recover your virtual machines when needed.
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Available free VM backup solutions for VMware
Most people use VM snapshot as one of the VMware backup solutions, which is not feasible for virtual machine protection. VM snapshots cannot replace backup, since snapshots are not independent, and will affect your VM performance in the long term. For businesses or organizations that want long-term data protection, it is better to consider the following backup solutions:
- Manually copy VM files: virtual disk files are stored in a VMware datastore which records the important data of virtual machines.
- Export VM to OVF/OVA: Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is a file format that supports the exchange of virtual appliances across products and platforms. You can export virtual machine files in this way and import them when you need to create new VMs.
- Clone VM: Clone VMware virtual machine is an efficient way to backup VM data, but it requires access to vCenter.
These options can suit some of your VM data protection needs. But as you may notice. They all need to be done manually on a VM-by-VM basis and are therefore not suitable for centralized management and batch operation situations.
If you want a convenient and reliable VMware backup solution for long-term VM data protection, you may consider picking an agentless and free VM backup software, which offers centralized backups for multiple VMware VMs. It’s commonly used to create independent and complete backups of multiple VMs with simple steps.
Free VMware backup software – AOMEI Cyber Backup
An ideal enterprise backup solution protects data and keeps business continuity. AOMEI Cyber Backup is a free, professional, and easy-to-use tool that is designed to protect virtual machines from security threats. It offers image-based backup to automate multiple virtual machines’ protection while running, and it allows you to perform fast disaster recovery, which reduces business downtime and financial loss.
AOMEI Cyber Backup supports VMware ESXi 6.0 and later versions and Hyper V backup software in Windows 8/8.1/10/11, Windows Server/Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2, and later versions.
An at-a-glance dashboard allows you to quickly perform everyday tasks like reporting, backup, and recovery with a few clicks.
To get started, you need to bind your VMware ESXi device to AOMEI Cyber Backup first, then create and manage VM backups from the central console without installing an agent on each VM.
Here I’ll introduce its basic operation to backup multiple VMware ESXi virtual machines securely.
3 easy steps to perform free VM backup
1. Bind Device: Open the AOMEI Cyber Backup web client, and access Source Device>> VMware ESXi >> Add vCenter or Standalone ESXi, then enter the required information and click Confirm.
It can batch backup large numbers of virtual machines on the vCenter Server or on a standalone ESXi host.
2. Create Backup Task: Access to Backup Task>> Create New Task to configure your VM backup task. In the opened wizard, perform the following steps.
- Device: select the virtual machines you want to back up on the VMware ESXi host.
- Target: select a local folder or network location (such as backup to NAS) to store the VM backups.
- Schedule: select the backup method as full/incremental backup, then specify the time according to daily / weekly / monthly to automatically run the VM backup task.
- Start Backup: click Start Backup and select Add the schedule and start backup now, or Add the schedule only.
When completing the VMware backup solution, you can monitor the backing-up process on the main interface, and you can also check the Backup Log to see if there are any errors that result in your backup failure.
3. Restore: In addition to reliable VMware VM backup, you can restore the entire VM from any selected backup history. It’s convenient to recover a VM by hitting Restore to original location when the VMware ESXi virtual machine fails.
Our intuitive central console provides an interface that makes it easy to identify, monitor, and manage your virtualized environment from any location.
With the comprehensive VMware backup solution, it can always secure your VMware environment and reduce business risk.
Conclusion
To protect your VMware virtual machines, you could back up them regularly, and the steps are shared in this article. With the help of free VMware backup software, it reduces costs and streamlining operations of VMware VM backup. The auto backup will protect your VMware workloads continuously and allows you to restore your VM quickly once accidental events happen.