In the virtual world, the bulky, intrusive and temperamental replication software needed for physical servers has been replaced by software that builds upon the basic snapshot and cloning technologies built into VMware vSphere. Because the basics are handled as part of the environment, virtual server backup products can tackle the harder problems like replication to remote sites for business continuity, user interfaces to eliminate user error, and speedy restores so you can use your backups right away when you need to.
In this series, we examine the basic architecture, key features and selling points of three top products in the server virtualization and data protection market:
PHD Virtual esXpress 3.6 has built-in replication features that increase data protection and recovery for remote data centers;
Vizioncore vRanger Pro Data Protection Platform (DPP) 4.1 supports image-level backup and restore for VMware and file-level recovery for Microsoft Windows;
Veeam Backup & Replication 3.1 offers a single backup, recovery and replication solution for all virtual machines regardless of operating system.
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Cathleen A. Gagne, Senior Editorial Director
About the author: Bob Plankers is the lead Linux and VMware systems engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Plankers has 14 years of experience in IT, and he also runs The Lone Sysadmin blog.
This was first published in October 2009