Agentless and Free VMware vSphere Backup Software

Necessity: VMware vSphere Backup Alternative

VMware vSphere is the industry-leading enterprise virtualization platform. Like other data, virtual machine backup is an important protection measure to ensure you recover important data in time and keep business continuity.

However, the official VMware vSphere backup software VMware Data Protection (VDP) has announced the End of Availability. According to VMware, vSphere 6.5 is the last release that includes vSphere Data Protection, and the future vSphere releases no longer include it.

This decision by VMware has prompted users to explore alternative backup solutions from third-party vendors to meet their VMware vSphere backup needs.

Agentless VMware vSphere backup software - AOMEI Cyber Backup

An effective VMware vSphere backup software protects your virtual environment and gives you the ability to quickly restore virtual machines when needed. AOMEI Cyber Backup is agentless VMware vSphere backup software that simplifies data protection by eliminating the need to install an individual agent on each virtual machine. It interacts directly with the hypervisor through the VMware API, increasing efficiency, simplifying management, and ensuring comprehensive backups across virtual infrastructures.

It also focuses on safeguarding virtual machines (VMs), capturing their entire state including configuration, OS, apps, and data for quick restoration in case of failures or disasters. In addition, it offers the following benefits.

Advantages:

✦ Incremental Backup: Commonly used in vSphere, incremental backups capture VM changes since the last backup, reducing data transfer and storage needs.
✦ Monitoring and Reporting: Backup solutions offer monitoring and reporting capabilities, tracking backup job statuses.
✦ Automatic Backup: Enjoy worry-free data protection without manual intervention.
✦ Centralized Management: Streamline your data management with our centralized platform, enabling easy oversight and control of all backup operations from a single interface.
✦ Role Assignment: Empower your team with tailored permissions and access levels, enhancing collaboration and security across your organization.

Pricing:

All of these plans can be purchased through subscription licenses or perpetual licenses:

• A annual license provides 1 year of AOMEI service, which includes technical support.
• A Perpetual license is a different approach where customers can purchase perpetual licenses for the software at a better price.
• Charge according to the number of virtual machines or choose Unlimited Plan, which is more cost-effective for larger virtual environments.

As for VMware vSphere, AOMEI Cyber Backup supports VMware ESXi 6.0 and later versions. Next, I will show you how to perform vSphere VM backup and restore via AOMEI Cyber Backup. You can click the following button to download the free trial.

*You can choose to install this VM backup software on either Windows or Linux system.

Using centralized and free vSphere backup software for VM protection

🔔 Backup VMware vSphere virtual machines easily:

1. Bind Devices: Access to AOMEI Cyber Backup web client, navigate to Source Device > VMware > + Add VMware Device to Add vCenter or Standalone ESXi host. And then click … > Bind Device.

2. Create Backup Task: Navigate to Backup Task > + Create New Task, and select VMware ESXi Backup as the Backup Type.

3. Set the Task Name, Device, Target, Schedule and Cleanup as needed.

• Task Name: you can change the task name or use the default name with an ordinal.
• Device: batch backup multiple VMs on vCenter or standalone host within one backup task.

• Target: select to back up to a local path, or to a network path like NAS.
• Schedule (optional): perform full, differential, or incremental backup, and automate execution according to the frequency you specified.

• Cleanup (optional): automatically delete the old backup copies that exceed the retention period you specified.

4. Run Backup: Now you can click Start Backup and select Add the schedule and start backup now, or Add the schedule only.

Created backup tasks will be listed and monitored separately for restoring, progress checking and schedule changing.

🔔 Restore the virtual machine from backup:

1. Restore from Backup: Select the backup task you want to restore, and click ... > Restore to open the wizard.

Or you can click Backup Management > History Versions. Specify a VM and select a restore point from the left list.

2. Start Restore: Choose to Restore to original location or Restore to new location. And click Start Restore to recover the virtual machine in place.

▶ Restore to new location: Create a new VM in the same or another datastore/host directly from the backup to perform out-of-spacre recovery, saves the trouble of re-configuring the new VM.

Summary

Regular VMware vSphere backup and restore is one of the most basic measures to ensure VM data security. However, if you have multiple VMs that need to be backed up and restored, using native ways may be laborious. For customers who use vSphere 6.5 or later versions, a third-party VMware vSphere backup software will be needed for replace VMware Data Protection (VDP).

In this regard, AOMEI Cyber Backup is a good alternative for VMware Data Protection. It helps you to centrally manage and automate the backup and restore of multiple VMware ESXi or Hyper-V VMs. Free yourself from the heavy workloads at an affordable price. Especially friendly to small medium-sized enterprises.

If you prefer a free vSphere backup software, you can also try the AOMEI Cyber Backup free edition.