Leading Hyper-V Backup Solution

With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can use powerful backup and recovery features that ensure full protection for your Hyper-V environments. NAKIVO Backup & Replication also delivers a wide range of data reduction, performance-boosting, backup administration tools, allowing you to save time and resources and eliminate any complexities associated with data protection. And most importantly, you can access all of the software’s capabilities and perform data protection activities directly from a centralised web-based dashboard that you can access anywhere and at any time, even from multiple devices.

The installation process of NAKIVO Backup & Replication requires minimum time and effort – you can install the software and then perform your first backup job in just two minutes! No extra configuration is required as all of the software features are built-in and available right out of the box. In addition, you can choose from a wide range of deployment options to find what best fits your needs, environment and budget. You can install NAKIVO Backup & Replication on Windows or Linux OS, deploy as a pre-configured Virtual Appliance, or install directly on a NAS device to create an all-in-one backup appliance.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication can help you easily perform Hyper-V backup copy jobs and safely send these backup copies offsite. Having an extra backup provides an additional level of data protection to ensure successful recovery. You can also create extra copies of Hyper-V backups and send them to the cloud. With Hyper-V backup copies, you can ensure compliance with the 3-2-1 backup rule, allowing you to have a backup plan for any data loss scenario. You can also choose to keep one or multiple copies of your backups, or set custom rules specifying which backups should be copied and when.

With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can instantly recover entire Hyper-V VMs, individual files, folders and application objects directly from compressed and deduplicated backups. In case of unexpected production machine failure or data loss, you can quickly resume your business operations without experiencing significant downtime. The all-in-one software provides a number of powerful recovery options that can help you reach the lowest recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) possible and cut your recovery times from days to hours, or even minutes.

Backups stored in the cloud can be vulnerable to ransomware and other malicious attacks. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can leverage the S3 Object Lock functionality to make your Microsoft Hyper-V VM backups stored in Amazon S3 buckets immutable for a specified period of time and protect data from being deleted or encrypted by ransomware. In addition, the Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) feature helps you apply the principle of least privilege by assigning specific roles to users and granting them permissions for each part of the data protection process in NAKIVO Backup & Replication. This way, you prevent unauthorized users from running, viewing or altering your Hyper-V VM backup and recovery operations. Also, the solution ensures your data is protected when stored in a non-secure location or transferred over the WAN with the VM Backup Encryption feature.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication uses the GFS retention scheme and offers backup size reduction tools so that you can archive Hyper-VMs without paying exorbitant storage costs. The grandfather-father-son retention scheme (GFS) consolidates and rotates redundant recovery points according to your preferences, ensuring all your data is accounted for without storing excess data. You can also use global deduplication and compression for even further space savings. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can store up to 4,000 recovery points per VM, giving you the flexibility to meet regulatory obligations or corporate guidelines.

Multiple security risks and threats can be eliminated with a comprehensive data protection plan which dictates how to prevent, respond to, and recover from any failure scenario. Therefore, careful backup job scheduling is an essential component of data protection management. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s Calendar dashboard, you can view all your data protection jobs (past, present, and future) and reschedule them with ease. This way, you can avoid potential job overlaps, offload production networks and identify vulnerabilities in your backup planning.

Backing up growing Hyper-V environments means that you need to store more data every day. To reduce the size of your backups, NAKIVO Backup & Replication automatically skips swap data and unused blocks, which would otherwise be read, processed, transferred, and stored in the repository. To further reduce backup size, NAKIVO Backup & Replication can automatically deduplicate all VM backups across an entire repository. The deduplicated data blocks are then automatically compressed to occupy the least amount of space. Together, these data reduction technologies can significantly reduce the storage space occupied by backups, saving you resources and money.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a full backup and recovery solution capable of protecting virtual, physical, and cloud and SaaS environments. The software delivers powerful yet affordable functionality for small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises. You can scale NAKIVO Backup & Replication horizontally or vertically to keep hundreds of hosts and thousands of Hyper-V VMs safe across multiple sites. You can scale out by increasing the number of product components and distributing the workload among them. Also, you can scale up by adding more resources to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, ensuring that even high production workloads remain protected.

Creating regular Hyper-V backups does not always guarantee that data can be restored. Backups can also get corrupted for various reasons and render recovery impossible. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can instantly verify the integrity of your Microsoft Hyper-V VM backups and make sure they can be used for recovery when needed. The solution can run a VM directly from a Hyper-V VM backup with networking turned off and make a screenshot of the successfully booted VM. The solution can also verify that you can successfully recover Hyper-V VMs by powering on the VM and checking the availability of the Hyper-V Integration Services (if they are installed on the VM). You can view the verification results in the web interface or receive them via email.

With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can automate most of your data protection activities by running policy-based jobs and setting up effective job schedules. NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows you to set up specific data protection policies, which would regularly scan your infrastructure and automatically add/remove Hyper-V VMs from corresponding jobs based on the selected criteria (such as name, size, location, power state, configuration, and so on). With сarefully scheduled and organized Hyper-V backup jobs, you can achieve impressive results – eliminate job overlaps, minimize administrative overhead, avoid retention policy gaps and, eventually, save you time and effort.

With the rich functionality of NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can improve your Hyper-V backup performance considerably. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides you with speed-boosting features, such as Network Acceleration and LAN-free backup mode. Network Acceleration allows you to increase backup and recovery speed even in busy LAN and WAN. With LAN-free data transfer modes, you can offload production networks, thus reducing backup windows and ensuring high backup performance. As a result, these technologies can boost VM backup speed by up to 2 times without affecting your production environment.

Multi-tenant mode in NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows you to deliver backup as a service (BaaS), replication as a service (RaaS) and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) to your customers. You can create up to 1,000 separate tenants within a single copy of the software and manage them from the tenant dashboard. Tenants’ environments are isolated, which means that a tenant can only access their own data. Tenants can perform their data protection and recovery jobs via the self-service portal and you, as the administrator, can control which jobs they are allowed to access and perform.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication can help you recover iindividual files, folders and application objects for applications like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft SQL Server instantly from compressed and deduplicated Hyper-V VM backups. Just select the recovery point, search for the file, folder or object you require and recover with a push of a button, without recovering the entire Hyper-V VM first. The advanced search capabilities of the solution allow you to quickly find the items you need using the name or even part of the name and restore them to their original or a different location.

Store at least one copy of your backup data in a remote location. With an offsite backup, you know that your data is recoverable even if your primary backup at the production site is lost or corrupted. Use NAKIVO Backup & Replication to create new copies of your Hyper-V VM backups without interfering with your production VMs. Choose any of the public clouds supported by the solution as a destination: Amazon S3, Wasabi or Microsoft Azure. For long-term data retention, write a copy of your backup to tape and make sure it is kept in a safe place.

Take care about the security of your Hyper-V backups by encrypting your data when sending it offsite and setting the role-based access controls (RBAC). NAKIVO Backup & Replication relies on AES 256-bit encryption. You can encrypt your data both in flight (when it travels to the repository) and at rest (when the data is already in the repository). Use the RBAC feature to grant access rights and permissions to other employees. When assigning these rights, follow the principle of the least privilege: only grant the bare minimum of permissions for the employee to get the job done.

Set bandwidth throttling rules to prevent backup jobs from consuming more network resources than you can allocate. With bandwidth throttling you ensure that your backup jobs don’t disrupt the performance of other operations, which is especially important during peak hours. First, identify how much bandwidth your business operations require. Second, create bandwidth rules to apply the appropriate bandwidth limit to your backup jobs. You can create both global and per-job rules. If the circumstances change, you can raise or lower the bandwidth limit at any time.

The worst time to find out that your Microsoft Hyper-V backups are not recoverable is when your primary machine goes down. Make sure this is never a problem with the Instant Verification feature. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers two verification methods for Hyper-V backups. Boot Verification starts the target VM and checks whether the hypervisor tools are running. Screenshot Verification boots the target VM and takes a screenshot of the VM screen. With both methods, you can receive an email report or check the job dashboard to verify that the Hyper-V backup job was successful.

When configured properly, a retention policy allows you to retain Hyper-V backups for any period that you need without letting them consume too much space. To create a retention policy, define how many recovery points you want to keep and how often they should be rotated. A recovery point is created each time you perform a backup and can be used for point-in-time restores. The amount and life cycle of recovery points depends on the type of data that your company is dealing with. NAKIVO Backup & Replication supports up to 4,000 recovery points for each Hyper-V and relies on the grandfather-father-son (GFS) rotation scheme.

Make sure to provision enough CPU, RAM, bandwidth and disk space for the backup processes to run smoothly. Backups are resource-intensive operations during which data is read, processed and transferred. The backup speed depends on the speed of these processes and the bandwidth available, but it is never higher than the speed of the slowest process in the data transfer chain. By increasing the amount of resources available to the backup software, you speed up backup jobs. Finally, when estimating the amount of the required storage space, it’s best to provision at least the same amount of space for your backups as consumed by your VMs.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides multiple features to simplify routing data protection tasks. Create policy rules to automate adding Microsoft Hyper-V VMs to the jobs or excluding them. Policy rules can be based on your preferred parameters, such as VM name, size, tag, location, and so on. When you create a new VM, NAKIVO Backup & Replication checks whether the VM matches any of your policies and automatically adds it to the respective job. The same works for existing VMs whose parameters change. If the VM no longer matches the policies, it is automatically excluded from the job.

Plan backup jobs and job chains carefully to prevent job overlaps and potential network congestion. Backups are resource-intensive and can affect the performance of the concurrent processes, especially during business hours. If you set two or more backup jobs to run simultaneously, it can create a bottleneck and slow down your entire network. Proper scheduling can help you ensure that your resources are used optimally. You can monitor the schedule and planned of all your past, current and future jobs in the Calendar dashboard available in the NAKIVO Backup & Replication user interface.