Over the years I have used a wide variety of backup solutions – some more useful than others. When reviewing requirements for client who I was refreshing or replacing the internal infrastructure for I wanted something cost effective, innovative and reliable.
After looking at various options – some that included hardware appliances I settled on an option that would do onsite virtual machine (VM) backups – offsite remote backups and offsite replication for Disaster recovery. I also wanted compression and deduplication – so I was looking for a solution that worked for small and larger businesses.
The solution I came across was Altaro. From downloading to first backup took no more than 30 minutes and probably a lot less. It supports a number of backup destination options – with a NAS probably being the simplest local solution. It supports both VMware and HyperV and there is also an option for physical machines – that solved a problem for me where clients have machines that will remain physical for licensing or other reasons.
The software can be purchased outright with maintenance but there is also an MSP option which means an minimum of 10 vms are licensed for backup but the software is central managed and reported through an Altaro cloud service. This actually means that you can manage those 10 vms backups centrally and easily. You can also add more to that model pro rata.
Whether the backup is licensed and run locally or through the MSP option – the setup is pretty much identical with the select of hosts, vm, backup locations and schedules. If offsite backups are required a component package is installed remotely on a windows vm or server and the backup is directed to that.
So far the solution has worked well and has allowed me to standardise on the same solution for a number of client. There will no doubt be more articles about the various features and challenges of Altaro so be sure to check back for more.