8. Backups in vSphere

Having good backups is a must for any environment, physical or virtual. Traditional backup methods that are used in physical environments can still be used in virtual environments, but alternatives are available that can make the process of backing up your virtual machines (VM) faster and more efficient. VMware introduced a product called VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) in VI3 that was a new approach to backing up ESX VMs. VCB leverages a proxy server to back up virtual disks, thus offloading the burden from the VM. VCB also provides network-less backups by backing up the VM’s virtual disks over the storage area network (SAN) fabric. In vSphere, VMware introduced the vStorage APIs for Data Protection as the successor to ...

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