Azure VMware Solution aka AVS is a private cloud solution on public cloud platforms. Azure VMware Solution provides enterprises with private clouds that contain vSphere clusters, built from dedicated bare-metal Azure infrastructure. AVS brings VMware workloads on Azure public cloud and helps customer to do “lift and shift” from ON-PREM VMware environments to AVS. Backup is very important to protect the customer data and help to recover the VM’s in case of any VM failures or regional outage. Microsoft had a partnership with industry-leading vendors for VMware-based environments backup. Customers have widely adopted these solutions for their on-premises deployments. Now, many partners have extended their solutions to Azure VMware Solution, using Azure to provide a backup repository and a storage target for long-term retention and archival.
Backup network traffic between Azure VMware Solution VMs and the backup repository in Azure travels over a high-bandwidth, low-latency link. Replication traffic across regions travels over the internal Azure backplane network, which lowers bandwidth costs for users.
Here are the most reliable third-party backup solutions available for AVS.
Cohesity is one of the popular data protection platforms for VMware environments. Cohesity has successfully validated the following scenarios with Cohesity DataProtect.
Full VM image backups: Backups Full VMs and applications like SQL server running in the AVS VM. It leverages VADP to protect AVS VMs. Deploy adapters in AVS VMs for application aware-backups.
Long term archive: Cohesity DataProtect can maintain a long term archive of AVS VMs and applications data to Azure Blob storage to meet business requirements.
Recovery: It recovers AVS VMs from Cohesity Helios and Azure Blob storage quickly to meet RTO requirements.
Migration from ONPREM to AVS: Cohesity DataProtect can migrate VMs from their on-premise vSphere cluster(s) to AVS SDDC.
Granular recovery of files: Recover files and folders from AVS VMs which can be recovered directly to the original VM, another VM or download the data directly from the Cohesity GUI to a local client.
Commvault is an enterprise-level data protection platform that contains modules to backup, restore, archive, replicate data. Customers can deploy Commvault on AVS cluster to protect the workloads similar to their ON-PREM datacenter. since AVS operates in the same way as an on-premises deployment of VMware. Commvault on AVS doesn’t support Live VM recovery using vMotion and Live mount since Microsoft does not provide access to hosts.
Key Features:
- Backups and restores using vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP)
- Changed block tracking (CBT)
- Full, incremental, differential, and synthetic full backups
- Restores of full VMs, VMDKs (alone or attaching to a VM), and guest files and folders
- Agentless file recovery
- Application-aware backups
- VM conversion from VMware to Microsoft Azure
- VM conversion from Microsoft Azure to VMware
- Live Sync replication and Live Sync Direct for snapshot-based replication
- Replication from VMware to Microsoft Azure
Dell Technologies works so closely with VMware since they are the parent organization to bring the best backup products for VMware vSphere environments. In the pandemic, customers continue to move workloads to the public cloud, VMware and Dell Technologies offer a unique joint engineering initiative bringing modern next-generation data protection for VMware workloads to the edge, core, and multi-cloud. Dell offers the same best-in-class data protection for on-prem environments as well as VMware workloads in the cloud.
Key Benefits
- Dell Technologies is proven enterprise data protection for Azure VMware Solutions
- Natively integrates into VMware management tools for the ultimate automation experience
- Image-level protection of hybrid cloud VMs
- Fast recovery of hybrid cloud workloads
- Supports File Level Recovery
- Consistent & seamless operations experience for VMware hybrid cloud
- Data stored on Azure Blob for optimal scale and lowest cost to protect
Veeam is robust backup software for VMware environments. Veeam Backup & Replication can be deployed and operated in AVS like you would any other VMware vSphere environment. Some features in Veeam Backup & Replication are limited or unavailable in Azure VMware Solution (AVS). Veeam offers customers leveraging Azure VMware Solution (AVS) the ability to deploy the same proven solutions simply, efficiently and seamlessly protecting workloads on-premises and in an Azure. Customers also can leverage their existing investments in VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) technologies.
Unified data management allows you to protect and manage your VMware workloads with the same tools and Veeam data protection solutions you use on-premises today.
Increase efficiency with managed infrastructure — scale your environment on-demand as your business needs change,
while leveraging your existing investment in Veeam Universal License (VUL)
Built-in replication: Veeam replication functionality takes a source workload and generates a fully functioning copy at
a remote location – this includes support for replicating on-premises VMs to Azure VMware Solution (AVS).
Accelerate adoption of the hybrid cloud with the ability to back up, replicate or migrate workloads to an Azure-based data-centre running VMware.
Native integration with Azure Blob: Back up Azure VMware Solution VMs and leverage the cost-effectiveness, Simplicity, and elasticity of Azure Blob storage.