VMWare Server Virtualization Management, Monitoring Tools and Features: VMWare Data Backup and Recovery Solutions

VMWare Server Virtualization Management, Monitoring Tools and Features: VMWare Data Backup and Recovery Solutions

There are a lot of VMWare Server Management and Monitoring Tools available which provide server virtualization, data backup and recovery solutions. We will explore various features of VMWare Tools. VMware Inc makes VMware Tools available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, FreeBSD, and Novell NetWare guest systems. VMWare strongly recommends that administrators install the VMware Tools in all virtual machines (VMs) for efficient data backup, recovery and protection. The VMware Tools Control Panel, which is organized in a set of tabs, provides a graphical environment in which VMware Tools settings can be configured. 

Following is the list of features provided by VMWare Tools:

1. Efficient VMWare Backup and Recovery

VMWare Tools ensure backups complete on time and keep infrastructure costs at bay despite exponential data growth. VMWare Tools optimize and speeds the backup and recovery process through deduplication.

2. Variable-length Deduplication

VMWare Tools are very storage space efficient. VMWare Tools enable the highest rates of deduplication in the industry – on average 99% for file systems and 96% for databases. 

Variable-length deduplication breaks files into sub-segments of variable length to determine those that are truly unique, minimizing backup storage requirements.

3. Global Deduplication

By deduplicating data across all VMs pointed to the same appliance, VMWare Tools further reduces the required backup storage. VMs are often deployed from standardized sets of templates and guest OS images, which makes large parts of their data identical. With VMWare Tools, redundant data only needs to be stored once.

4. Changed Block Tracking Backup

VMWare Tools reduces the impact on the virtual network during backups by leveraging CBT in combination with variable-length deduplication, sending only daily unique changes to the virtual appliance. VMWare Tools automatically merges the unique blocks into the previous backup to create a full backup.

Recovery times can be dramatically reduced by tracking the delta of changed blocks between the current state of the VM and its backup, so that only required blocks are restored.

5. Easy to deploy

VMWare Tools are deployed as a virtual machine appliance, making it very easy to deploy with little additional configuration required post-deployment.

6. Easy to use

Setting backup schedules is simple and efficient since you can define different policies based on specified retentions and schedules. Policies are applied to groups of virtual machines, based on business needs and data types.

7. One-step recovery

The intuitive web-based user interface of VMWare Tools let you perform simple recovery of full VMs or individual files. VMWare Tools also provides the ability for end-user self-service restore to offload restore requests to the IT department. Instead of making users wait while you provision storage, extract the backup and copy it to production, restart a VM directly from the backup. 

8. Agent-free

There are no agents for you to license, deploy, manage or monitor on hosts or VMs.

9. Scalability

VMWare Tools provide a distributed architecture to optimize performance in remote office/branch office (ROBO) and large-scale deployments.

10. Centralized management

From a web-based console, you can monitor jobs across multiple backups servers, edit jobs on any server, and search across all backups — all from a centralized location. 

11. Back up to the cloud

Turn any public storage cloud into easy-to-use data repositories for your backups. Automatically copy your backups to Amazon, Azure or any other clouds and add offsite archiving to your local recovery capabilities with advanced VMWare Tools.