Hyper-V Backup Software - NAKIVO Backup & Replication

Key Benefits

Protect Hyper-V VMs and All Application Data

Image-Based Backup

With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can perform image-based backups of running Hyper-V VMs. All VM data, including disks and configuration files, is captured during a Hyper-V backup job. This way, you can restore the entire VM in just a few clicks.

Incremental Backup

Hyper-V backups are incremental. After the initial full backup, the product makes use of Hyper-V’s native Resilient Change Tracking (RCT) technology. Only changed data blocks are transferred to the backup repository, which increases VM backup speed and saves storage space.

Application-Aware Backup

NAKIVO Backup & Replication leverages Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) technology to create application-aware backups for Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SQL, SharePoint, Oracle, etc. Hyper-V backup includes all VM data and VM configuration, ensuring consistency of your applications and databases.

Long-Term Backup Archival

For each Hyper-V backup, you can save up to 1,000 recovery points, rotating them on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. Such an approach allows you to recover individual OS files and application objects, as well as an entire VM, in the exact state as they were during the backup.

Simplify Backup Administration with Automated Hyper-V Backup

NAKIVO Backup & Replication features several tools to help you automate Hyper-V backup. You can set up backup policies based on VM name, size, location, power state configuration, or other parameters. NAKIVO Backup & Replication adds matching VMs to the job scope and then regularly scans your infrastructure to find and protect newly discovered VMs that match the policy.

Also, you can add entire Hyper-V hosts to a backup job. This way, all existing VMs and any new VMs added to the Hyper-V host in the future are also automatically included in the job. Moreover, you can set up job chaining (e.g., have a Hyper-V backup job trigger a Backup Copy job), run custom pre- or post-job scripts, and integrate with third-party monitoring tools using HTTP APIs.

Boost VM Backup Performance

With the rich functionality of NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can considerably improve your Hyper-V backup performance. 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 networks. 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 2X without affecting your production environment.

Eliminate a Single Point of Failure

Having a simple disaster recovery plan in place is crucial for resuming business-critical operations quickly after accidents or disasters. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can help you easily set up automated Hyper-V backup copy jobs and send backup copies to a safe offsite location. You can even create an extra copy of Hyper-V backups and send them to Azure and AWS Clouds. You can choose to maintain one or multiple exact copies of your backups, or set custom rules specifying which VM backups should be copied, where, how, and when. With Backup Copy, you can ensure compliance with the 3-2-1 backup rule, allowing you to have a backup plan under any disaster scenario.

Copy Backups to Tape

Tape is still regarded as the number one media for long term data storage. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can copy your backups to tape and perform seamless recovery of your tape backup data when necessary. The entire process can be completely automated with Policy-Based Data Protection. Additionally, with Job Chaining, the Backup Copy jobs can start automatically when the initial backup job finishes running. All in all, NAKIVO Backup & Replication can greatly simplify the management of your tape devices and cartridges.

Verify the Validity of Your Hyper-V Backups

NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s automated instant verification functionality gives you peace of mind. Every time a Hyper-V backup job is completed, the software can test-recover VMs from backups (with networking turned off), take a screenshot of the booted OS or check the availability of Hyper-V Integration Services, and then discard the VM. The results of this operation can be viewed in the product’s interface or received via email. This way, you can identify if there are any issues with your VM backups beforehand and rest assured that your Hyper-V backups are functional and bootable.

Cut Storage Costs

Backing up Hyper-V environments means you need to store more data every day. To reduce the size of your backups, NAKIVO Backup & Replication automatically skips swap data, which would otherwise be read, processed, transferred, and stored in the repository. To further reduce backup size, NAKIVO Backup & Replication automatically deduplicates all VM backups across an entire repository, even if the repository stores a mix of Hyper-V, VMware, and AWS EC2 backups. 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 VM backups, saving you resources and money.

Recover What You Need Directly from VM Backups

With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can instantly recover Hyper-V VMs, files, and application objects directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups. With the Instant VM Recovery feature, you can restore an entire Hyper-V VM to either the same host or a new one in just a few clicks. You can also restore files and folders (including file permissions) back to source or a custom location. With Instant Object Recovery, MS Exchange, MS Active Directory, and MS SQL, objects can be instantly recovered back to source. Moreover, Universal Object Recovery allows you to recover objects of any other application by mounting disks from a backup directly to your production machines.

Reduce Management Complexity

With the multi-tenant mode, NAKIVO Backup & Replication lets you deliver Backup-as-a-Service to your customers. You can create up to 1,000 isolated tenants within a single instance of the product and easily manage them from a central management console. Tenants can represent departments, branch offices, customers, business units, etc. Each tenant has access only to their own unique jobs and environment via the self-service portal. This way, you can significantly minimize management overhead and make the process of data protection administration less challenging and resource-intensive.

Ensure On-Demand Scalability

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a comprehensive backup and recovery solution capable of protecting physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Its rich functionality can comply with the needs of not only small and medium-sized businesses, but also large enterprises. The solution can be scaled horizontally or vertically, allowing you to protect hundreds of hosts and thousands of Hyper-V VMs at a single/multiple sites. You can scale out through extending the number of product components and distributing the workload among them. On the other hand, you can scale up through adding more resources to the solution, ensuring that even high production workloads get supported.

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Choose the Best Deployment Option for Your Business

Deploy as a VA

Install a pre-configured VMware or Nutanix AHV VA to deploy the solution in VMware vSphere or Nutanix environments.

Install on Windows

Simply download and run the Windows installer to deploy NAKIVO Backup & Replication with a single click.

Deploy in Amazon Cloud

Install NAKIVO Backup & Replication in Amazon Cloud in just a few clicks using a pre-configured AWS EC2 Image.

Install on a NAS Device

Install NAKIVO Backup & Replication directly on a NAS device to build your own VM Backup Appliance.

Install on Linux

Easily install NAKIVO Backup & Replication on a Linux OS of your choice by running a single command.

Key Features in Detail

Policy-Based Data Protection

With the Policy-Based Data Protection feature, you can automate all your data protection tasks, including Hyper-V backup jobs, in just a few clicks. NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows you to set up specific data protection policies, which will regularly scan your infrastructure and automatically add/remove Hyper-V VMs from corresponding jobs based on the selected criteria. Policy rules can include a VM’s name, size, location, power state, configuration, tag, or a combination of these parameters. This can ensure that even the tiniest changes in your production environment can be identified in a timely fashion, and acted upon by our solution, saving you lots of time and effort.

Instant Verification

Even if a backup job has been successfully completed, there is no guarantee that VM recovery will go as planned in the future. The VM data stored in Hyper-V backups can get damaged or corrupted, resulting in a failed recovery and loss of critical data. With the Instant Verification feature, you can ensure that your Hyper-V VMs are functional and can be easily recovered, should the need arise. Once a backup job is finished, the product can power on the VM from the backup with networking turned off, make a screenshot of the booted OS, and discard the test-recovered VM. Alternatively, the solution can check the availability of hypervisor tools to verify that the guest OS is up and running. The product can display the verification results in the product’s interface or send the report to your email.

Global Deduplication

NAKIVO Backup & Replication leverages the block-level deduplication technology, automatically deduplicating all VM backups across your backup repository. The technology ensures that only unique data blocks are saved to the backup repository which helps drastically reduce the backup size and storage capacity requirements. As a result, you can store more recovery points per VM backup and cut associated storage costs. Global deduplication is enabled in NAKIVO Backup & Replication by default, but it can be turned off at any time if, for example, you prefer to use hardware-based deduplication.

Microsoft SQL and Exchange Log Truncation

Microsoft SQL and Microsoft Exchange track all database changes by recording them to the transaction log files. These files can grow overtime, resulting in overconsumption of disk space and a potential server crash. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can help you address this issue in a simple and efficient manner. The software can automatically truncate transaction log files from the source Hyper-V VMs after each successful backup. The product can also easily identify which SQL or Exchange transaction log files have already been written to the database and remove them. This ensures that no extra space is consumed on your server.

Hyper-V Backup Copy

Data backups can get lost, damaged, or corrupted as a result of accidental deletion, hacker attack, hardware failure, etc. To prevent the issue beforehand, you can create a copy of critical Hyper-V backups and send those backup copies offsite or to Amazon and Azure Clouds. With Backup Copy, you can create a mirrored copy of a primary backup repository or choose what backups should be copied and set up a custom job schedule. This way, you can ensure that you can always recover your critical data even if disaster renders your primary backups unavailable.

Backup to Tape

Managing your tape backups can be quite an involved routine, especially in large environments. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can alleviate this burden with its Backup to Tape functionality. The solution can effectively copy your backups to tape for archival purposes and to achieve compliance. The process can be completely automated with Policy-Based Data Protection. Additionally, NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows for easy and intuitive management of your tape devices, cartridges, and tape backups as well as for the creation of media pools to simplify your tape backup activities.

Flexible Job Scheduling

Managing multiple data protection tasks in large environments can be a challenging task which consumes a lot of your time and resources. Moreover, it is important to monitor each and every change within your infrastructure and ensure that essential data protection activities are performed as required. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s Calendar Dashboard, you can view all past, current, and future Hyper-V backup jobs, check the expected time duration for a specific job, and the time frame within which a past job has been completed. This way you can monitor the workload distribution and easily update backup job schedules if any overlaps have been identified. As you can see, NAKIVO Backup & Replication can make the process of backup job scheduling more manageable and effective.

Flash VM Boot

Every minute of business downtime can cause serious damage to your organization. Thus, fast recovery has become the priority in today’s world of data protection. With the Flash VM Boot functionality, you can recover critical Hyper-V VMs in seconds through booting them directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups. With just a few clicks, you can select a VM backup, a recovery point, and a preferred recovery location (a host, a resource pool, or a cluster), and have the VM up and running in no time. The booted VM can be migrated to a production environment to minimize the effect of service disruption, or you can run tests on the booted VM before applying any changes to the production environment. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the recovery process is fast and easy, allowing you to achieve maximum results with minimal effort.

Universal Object Recovery

Full VM recovery can take up a lot of precious time and effort, especially if you only need to recover an individual item from the VM. With Universal Object Recovery in NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can restore any application object back to source, another VM or instance, as well as physical machine. You can use your time and resources in a more efficient way by avoiding the complexity of full VM recovery. Use the feature to mount VM disks from a specific backup directly to a production VM and then select the items you wish to recover. With this advanced functionality, you can recover objects with no restriction on applications ensuring that no item is irrevocably lost.

Advanced Bandwidth Throttling

When running data protection jobs during business hours, your production networks might get overloaded, resulting in the poor performance of critical business applications. With the Advanced Bandwidth Throttling functionality, you can control your network traffic by setting a bandwidth limit for your Hyper-V backup jobs. For this purpose, you can create global or per-job rules, which regulate how much network bandwidth can be consumed by your backup jobs. The bandwidth throttling rules can be applied on different schedules, reducing the risk of overloading your LAN and WAN networks during specific timeframes. This way, NAKIVO Backup & Replication ensures that your data protection activities can in no way affect your business-critical processes.

LAN-Free Data Transfer Mode

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides an advanced speed-boosting functionality which can considerably increase the VM backup speed even in busy LAN and WAN networks. With the NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s Hot Add feature, the product can access VM data directly from the VM storage, bypassing the host’s TCP/IP stack which results in faster data transfer and thus shorter backup windows. Additionally, the feature can help significantly offload your production network.

Network Acceleration

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a robust data protection solution which can ensure high VM backup performance using the Network Acceleration feature (provided that you have two Transporters). When the data is being transferred over the network, the source Transporter first reads, compresses, and optimizes the data and then sends it to the target transporter. With the Network Acceleration enabled, you can distribute the load between two transporters, providing for faster Hyper-V backups.

VM Backup Encryption

Data is a valuable asset of any organization which should be secured at all costs. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the VM Backup Encryption feature which can protect data in a secure and efficient manner. Your critical data can be encrypted both in flight and at rest using AES 256 encryption. Encryption in flight ensures that your backup data is safe while travelling to the repository while encryption at rest allows you to protect the backup data from the moment it reaches the destination.

API for VM Backup Automation

With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can minimize management overhead, optimize backup processes, as well as save resources and effort using HTTP API. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can easily integrate with third-party solutions, which can provide monitoring, automation, and orchestration capabilities. More so, an Integration Kit includes the API functionality, as well as API documentation and code examples.

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Choose the Best Deployment Option for Your Business