Five points – my VM backup must-have points. Every time I spoke with a technology partners, other vendors, customers I stay with this 5 golden rules.
Write a comment if you agree or not 🙂

1) agentless backup

Agentless backup enables VM’s backups to be performed without needing to deploy agent software on the host. This is the easiest and most efficient way to protect your virtual machine infrastructure. In addition, this approach and architecture will safe your precious time and operational costs in the end.

2) backup destination / freedom of choice

Yes. You have a choice. Modern data protection platforms allow you to store data in different targets. Be sure that vendor, from which you are validating and purchase software will not hurt you in the end. Keep in mind, that after a while your company could change a hypervisor vendor, location, migrate to cloud or simply want to move from the old backup repository to the new one.

Example targets:

• local file system (iSCSI, NFS, CIFS)
• object storage (AWS S3, OpenStackSWIFT, Azure Blob Storage)
• VTL’s (software or hardware based)
• option to integrate with enterprise backup providers leaders such as IBM Spectrum Protect, Dell EMC Networker, Veritas Netbackup (you will never know, if you will not have to integrate and unified backup process in your DC)

3) no matter what, squash your data

If it’s possible, use incremental backup – deduplicate, compress your data on source and target side. Every GB of your stored backup is your expense, try to optimize as much as possible.

4) be open to the 3rd party solutions

There is no modern backup solution without API. RESTful API seems to be the best and the fastest way for the most organization and their developers to integrate backup stack into their internal processes. RESTful API can provide a fully orchestration and automation, specially useful for large enterprises and manage service providers.

5) keep it simple

We are living in 2019. The era of old-fashioned UI, command line interfaces is over. Demand simplicity from you backup solution. Let UI will be as intuitive as possible.