I was reading through PHD Virtual's Press Release today PHD Virtual Technologies Raises the Bar for Performance and Scalability of Virtualization Backup and saw some really cool features that I though stood out.
PHD Virtual has extended it's backup capability to not only VMware, but Citrix XenServer as well. PHD has aligned itself with a very niche market with the people that do run Xen as their hypervisor of choice.
I guess PHD did some coding changes because backup processes now run faster. I'm not sure if this is in corporation of VMware CBT ability now available in PDH Virtual which does increase backup times dramatically. PHD proclaims that using VMware CBT, you can now get 5x faster backup performance, but I would venture to say you can get much more than that.
The coolest feature is the ability to backup an entire vApp as a single process. This is really cool from a management perspective. a Virtual App (or vApp) is a set or subset of VMs that are needed to run a single application. For instance, a single application may need an application server, a database server, and webserver to function. By combining all three of these VMs as a single vApp, it's viewed as a holistic set. When you need to recover these virtual machines, more often than not, you will need to recover all three to a certain period in time so they are all in sync. Making this process available in a few clicks allows backup administrators to easily recover applications.
PHD Virtual Backup 5.2 introduces the following new capabilities:
- Faster Virtual Machine Backup – faster processing of virtual machine backup jobs
- 5x Faster VMware CBT Based Backup – CBT based backups now run up to 5 times faster
for on-going backups - Dual-NIC Support – supports larger environments that have separate management and data networks for increased security and performance
- VMware vApp Support – provides the ability to backup VMware vApp containers comprising one or more virtual machines as a single entity
- Optimized Retention Processing – improves the processing and performance of automated backup catalogue trimming