VMware Backup scheduling

Back up your VMware virtual servers without a hassle

Built on the most popular server virtualization platform, VMware vSphere VMs often contain valuable business data. If your clients use VMware for virtualization, you’ll need to provide a backup solution for your VMware virtual machines. To protect VMware server data from worst-case scenarios, use Cove Data Protection to help preserve your virtual environments hosted on VMware vSphere hypervisors. With the right backup solution, you can keep data within your entire virtual infrastructure safe and recoverable, even if the underlying hardware malfunctions.

Backup - LocalSpeedVault

Secure storage both locally and in the cloud

Cove sends all backups to our private cloud by default, storing them off the local network and out of the reach of ransomware. But you can also use the LocalSpeedVault feature and the hardware of your choice to keep a local copy.

Because Cove Data Protection offers both local and remote backup storage, MSPs have more flexibility for disaster recovery. For example, N‑able local storage allows you to retrieve backup data more quickly, and more closely keep tabs on your backup data security. At the same time, cloud storage helps ensure that recent data is copied to an external location, helping ensure its availability if natural disaster impacts the primary data location. N‑able also allows MSPs more convenient backup management.

Cove Recovery Dashboard

Gain rapid recovery for your VMware virtual servers

After you make the switch to Cove Data Protection, your VMware virtual machines can be rapidly backed up to our global cloud and optionally, also to your LocalSpeedVault. For enterprises that need to keep their business running, fast recovery can be even more important than fast backup. In case of a system emergency, you need to ensure your virtual servers can get up and running as quickly as possible, to minimize loss of time and money when disaster strikes.

Cove Data Protection is designed to offer rapid, easy data recovery, whether for specific files and folders, or entire systems. When you recover your virtual machines with Cove Data Protection, our proprietary TrueDelta deduplication, compression, and WAN optimization maximize efficiency in data recovery. The option of storing in a LocalSpeedVault provides local caching so you can restore VMware components as quickly as possible.

users checking a screen

Choose physical-to-virtual recovery options and more

Physical-to-virtual recovery can come in handy when your business needs to quickly recover physical servers to a secondary environment. In the event of a hardware malfunction, you might not have time to replace the physical system while applications and data are offline.

When you back up your physical servers, physical-to-virtual recovery allows you to restore physical components using VMware, placed into your vSphere environment, when you retrieve your information from the N‑able cloud.

You may wish to get your servers up and running as a virtual system as you work to replace your physical hardware. Or, you may continue with VMware servers and scrap the hardware altogether. Physical-to-virtual recovery gives you the option to recover your data in a virtual environment and get critical applications and data back online.

Cove Main Dashboard

Maximize efficiency with a user-friendly management console

The Cove Data Protection multitenant dashboard allows you to maximize backup and recovery efficiency with an easy-to-use control center. With Cove, you can see the backup status of your customers, across their servers, workstations, and Microsoft 365  domains, in a single glance. Color-coded charts and one-click drilldown can dramatically reduce your administrative time.

The main dashboard can be customized to meet your needs and critical functions are accessible from the main menu. Cove’s system dashboard is designed to provide visibility into backups across your customers’ devices, including the overall health and status of the devices and network. MSPs can use the device dashboard to easily dig down into granular backup information for individual devices. This intuitive user interface, designed for a multitenant environment, can be the key to streamlining your data backup and recovery process. Managing your VMware backup has never looked so simple.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is VMware backup and how does it work?

What is VMware backup and how does it work?

VMware backup allows you to efficiently store and recover your VMware virtual machines in case of emergency.

The purpose of VMware backup software is to capture and store your server data at regular intervals, and to easily recover your vSphere when disaster strikes. VMware backup can use off-premises and optional on-site storage to preserve your virtual machines and recover them without changing their configuration.

VMware backup with N‑able can involve either granular data backup or full system state backup of each VM. Our TrueDelta data compression, deduplication, and WAN optimization technology helps to optimize data transfer speeds, and this applies to both backup and recovery.

Hypervisor vs Guest level backup?

Hypervisor vs Guest level backup?

Backup Manager offers backup and recovery services for VMware vSphere (ESXi) and Hyper-V virtual machines. This is done by the native Hypervisor snapshot functionality that will back up the VM data and VM settings (such as drivers, network adapters, and printers).

In specific circumstances host-level backup is the best option to protect a virtual appliance or Linux VM.

For Windows VM’s, we strongly recommend guest-level backups (device install inside each virtual machine) as it will give more granularity and flexibility.

You can standardize backup settings using Profiles and optimize the backup efficiency by adding filters to exclude temp and cache files.

How does Changed Block Tracking (CBT) interact with backup processes?

How does Changed Block Tracking (CBT) interact with backup processes?

Virtual machines running on ESX/ESXi hosts can track disk sectors that have changed. This feature is called Changed Block Tracking (CBT). On many file systems, CBT identifies the disk sectors altered between two change set IDs.

Before you start backups, it can be a good idea to enable CBT on your virtual machines. It is a highly effective feature that helps reduce the duration of subsequent backups. Note that the CBT feature does not influence statistics in the “Size of Processed Files” and “Transferred Size” columns in backup reports.

What are some VMware backup and recovery granularity options?

What are some VMware backup and recovery granularity options?

You can back up any of the following:

  • The whole server (its configuration will not be backed up)
  • A virtual machine
  • One of its disks

You can recover the whole VMware machine as a working unit, one of its disks, or individual files and folders from a disk.

If you choose to restore files and folders from a virtual disk, there are some additional requirements:

  • The Virtual Drive tool is installed and running.
  • The file system on the computer where Backup Manager is installed must support the file systems in the virtual machine that is being recovered (for example, NTFS or FAT). This is necessary to be able to expand the contents of the virtual disks.

Why should I back up my vSphere?

Why should I back up my vSphere?

As an MSP, it’s your job to provide IT protection that will help your client’s bottom line. In case disaster strikes, your business needs both a full copy of its VMware virtual servers and a fast recovery plan.

Without VMware vSphere backup, you could lose money from lost or compromised data, or from damage to your brand reputation. VMware backup software should offer a complete data backup plan, plus a fast and easy data recovery plan.

Is VMware backup secure?

Is VMware backup secure?

Without the right security protection, VMware backup could potentially expose your system to new security threats. IT managers might be wary of off-premises VMware backup due to concerns that your data could be compromised while in motion, or while at rest in the off-premises data storage unit.

Fortunately, Cove Data Protection makes your VMware security a priority. We use end-to-end AES 256-bit encryption and store your VMware data in one of more than 30 ISO-certified data centers worldwide designed for security.

Cove Data Protection

Secure backup and recovery for your VMware machines

  • Backup and recovery for your vSphere VMs
  • Enjoy virtual recovery of physical servers to vSphere
  • Cloud storage is included in your price