Application-aware Backup and Replication

When you back up a VM that runs Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SQL Server or any other application/database, it is critical to ensure that the data inside those application and database backups is consistent. This is important because portions of data are kept in memory and some transactions may be incomplete when the VM backup is made. If no actions are taken to flush memory and I/O operations, such backups would be crash-consistent, that is, an equivalent of pulling the server plug and then powering it back on. Of course, most modern applications and databases provide ways to recover from such a state, but in most cases you’d still need to waste time on manual restore operations and run a risk of losing data.

To ensure that your application and database data is consistent, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the application awareness feature. To perform consistent backups and replicas of Windows-based VMware and Hyper-V VMs, NAKIVO Backup & Replication relies on the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) service running inside VMs. What if your application is not VSS-aware or runs on Linux? NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the ability to run custom pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts to enable application-consistent VM backup and replication. A pre-freeze script is executed before a snapshot of a VM is taken, and post-thaw script is executed after the snapshot has been taken.

With the application-awareness feature is turned on, your backups and replicas will contain consistent application and database data, without performing any extra configuration steps. As a result, you can not only instantly recover VMs, but also instantly Microsoft Exchange objects (such as emails), and recover Active Directory (such as users), directly from a compressed and deduplicated backup repository