Backup Support Critical When Selecting Hypervisore

This report, published on October 3, 2024, was written by Jerome M. Wendt, president and founder, Data Center Intelligence Group LLC (DCIG).

Backup Support Critical When Selecting a Hypervisore

Changes are afoot in many organizations, especially those managing virtualized environments. Two factors specifically contribute to these organizations wanting to change the hypervisor they use in their virtualized environment. VMware by Broadcom has changed its software licensing while its competitors have made notable enhancements to their hypervisor technology.

These market dynamics have prompted many organizations to re-consider which virtualization solution they will use going forward. Large organizations may specifically find the list of competitive hypervisors from which they may choose quite short.

Yet as larger organizations consider different hypervisors, they must ask and answer some key questions. Specifically, they must establish how they will back up, restore, and recover data hosted on an alternative hypervisor. Addressing these data protection questions early on becomes critical to making the best choice of an alternative hypervisor solution.

All hypervisors face similar backup and recovery concerns
Hypervisors deliver key software features that many organizations often want. These include software-defined computing, storage, and networking services. These services give organizations the flexibility to better utilize their hardware and achieve heightened levels of application and data availability.

The availability of these hypervisor features does not, however, alleviate all backup concerns. No hypervisor can stop the possibility of data corruption or users making mistakes that result in data loss. Underlying hardware can still fail or get damaged or destroyed that again may result in data loss. Further, ransomware represents a constant threat that contributes to data being compromised, deleted, encrypted, or exported out of the company.

Baseline hypervisor backup and recovery requirements
These challenges require organizations to select a backup solution that protects them against these types of events. The backup solution must support protecting applications and data on the hypervisor as well as delivering baseline backup features. These features minimally include performing differential, image-level, incremental, and full backups.

Organizations with databases should also verify it offers options to perform application and crash-consistent snapshots. Once it creates the backups, the solution should then effectively, efficiently, and securely store backups locally and remotely.

On the restore and recovery side, the backup solution should facilitate fast, efficient data recovery with multiple restore options. Restore options may include individual files, full disk or VM recoveries, instant recoveries, and “sandbox recoveries” for testing and malware scanning.

In today’s hybrid multi-hypervisor, multi-cloud world, most organizations want to recover to other hypervisors and offsite to cloud platforms. Further, many organizations also want options that permit less technical staff to perform these restores and recoveries as needed.

Backup and recovery support critical component of hypervisor decision
Organizations face more IT challenges than ever. Count growing virtual environments, evaluating alternative virtualization platforms, and protecting data on these platforms among them. Selecting a third-party backup solution that protects multiple hypervisors as part of the remedy to these challenges.

The right backup solution does more than back up and recover data. It integrates with different hypervisors and leverages their specific data protection APIs and features. By selecting such a backup solution, organizations may then select the right hyperconverged platform for them.

The backup solution should then provide visibility into the backup environment, be it on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid. This necessitates the solution offers a unified view of backups, data protection status, and workload health across these environments. This view positions organizations to centrally manage backups and recoveries even as they improve their operational efficiency and risk management posture.

This blog entry was excerpted from a longer report that DCIG produced for Quest Software. Interested readers may access, register, and download the full report by following this link that will take you to a trusted 3rd-party website.