This topic describes the VMware backup and disaster recovery feature of Cloud Backup. It covers the advantages, how it works, procedures, and costs for both on-premises VMware and Alibaba Cloud VMware Service (ACVS) backup and disaster recovery.
Introduction
The VMware backup and disaster recovery feature is a full-machine protection solution from Cloud Backup for virtual machines (VMs) in on-premises VMware environments and Alibaba Cloud VMware Service (ACVS). It backs up entire VMs to the cloud simply, securely, and reliably. If an on-premises data center fails, a VM goes down, production data is accidentally deleted, or a ransomware attack occurs, you can restore the entire VM from a backup vault in the cloud. You can restore to an on-premises VMware environment, Alibaba Cloud VMware Service, or Alibaba Cloud ECS. This provides disaster recovery for business systems and ensures data security and business continuity.
This feature has some limits. For more information, see Compatible systems and limits.
Key advantages
No on-premises hardware required
You can back up data directly from your on-premises environment to the cloud. No separate hardware purchase is needed.
Agentless
You do not need to install a client inside the VM operating system. You can simply deploy one or more backup gateways in the VMware environment.
Integrated backup and disaster recovery
After a VM is backed up, you can restore it to your on-premises VMware environment, Alibaba Cloud VMware Service, or Alibaba Cloud ECS. This ensures both data security and business continuity.
Source-side deduplication and compression
The Cloud Backup gateway compresses and deduplicates data at the source before backup. This saves bandwidth during upload and reduces backup storage consumption in the cloud.
Backup locking to prevent accidental deletion
Cloud Backup provides a backup vault-based locking feature. Backup data cannot be deleted by any account or method before the configured retention period expires.
How it works
VMware vCenter is advanced server management software. It provides a centralized platform to control your vSphere environment and gives you full visibility into and management of your hybrid cloud. In the vCenter that you want to back up, you can deploy and activate a Cloud Backup VMware backup and disaster recovery gateway using the Open Virtualization Appliance (OVA) VM template provided by Cloud Backup. Each vCenter environment requires only one gateway, but you can deploy more for larger environments. The gateway backs up VMs according to the backup plan.
When a backup job runs, the backup gateway takes a snapshot of the specified VM. It then reads the snapshot data using the official VMware software development kit (SDK). After data deduplication and compression, the gateway uploads the data to the cloud to complete the backup. Cloud Backup uses an automatic incremental backup and merge mechanism. After the first full backup, each subsequent backup uploads only the changed data. This data is then synthesized into a new full backup in the cloud. This process reduces network and storage consumption. Cloud Backup also supports the official VMware incremental interface. This lets you read native incremental data directly, which greatly reduces data transmission over the internal network.
Cloud Backup supports migration to Alibaba Cloud over the Internet, a VPN, or a leased line. For backups over the Internet, the backup gateway only needs to access the Internet. You do not need to expose its IP address to the Internet.
Cloud Backup supports restoring VMware VM backup data as an ECS image in the Alibaba Cloud environment. You can clone the source VM's data from a specific backup point in time. This enables VM-level disaster recovery and migration from an on-premises data center to the cloud.
When restoring a backed-up VMware VM to an ECS image, Cloud Backup automatically creates a temporary intermediate ECS instance. This instance is used to restore data and generate the image. The system creates a snapshot for this image by default, which incurs storage fees. After the image is generated, the intermediate instance is automatically released, leaving only the ECS image. You can create ECS instances from this image as needed to restore data and quickly rebuild your system environment.
Procedures
On-premises VMware VMs
The following procedure shows how to back up on-premises VMware VMs in the Cloud Backup console.
You are not charged for activating Cloud Backup. You are charged for the Cloud Backup client that you use to back up VMware VMs and the storage usage of backup vaults. For more information, see Billing methods and billable items.
To ensure that your on-premises VMware VMs can be backed up as expected, you must create a VMware username and password for Cloud Backup to access the vCenter Server and its resources.
Create a disaster recovery gateway
Create a disaster recovery gateway in the Cloud Backup console. A disaster recovery gateway helps you back up and restore data.
Install and activate the disaster recovery gateway
After you download the gateway and certificate, you need to install and activate the gateway in your VMware environment. After you activate the disaster recovery gateway, you can create backup and restore jobs in the Cloud Backup console.
Before you back up VMware VMs, you must add a vCenter Server in the Cloud Backup console.
In the Cloud Backup console, create a backup plan and configure the plan name, backup cycle, and retention period. Cloud Backup starts the backup plan and continuously backs up data from the selected VMware VMs.
If an exception occurs in a VMware VM, you can create a restore job to restore the VMware VM to an on-premises server, an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance, or the vCenter environment of ACVS.
ACVS
The following procedure shows how to back up ACVS VMs in the Cloud Backup console.
You are not charged for activating Cloud Backup. You are charged for the Cloud Backup client that you use to back up VMware VMs and the storage usage of backup vaults. For more information, see Billing methods and billable items.
Prepare a dedicated VMware environment
To ensure that your VMware VMs can be backed up as expected, you must obtain the username and address that are used to log on to the VMware management component, and configure a firewall between your virtual private cloud (VPC) and the dedicated VMWare environment.
Create a disaster recovery gateway
Create a disaster recovery gateway in the Cloud Backup console. A disaster recovery gateway helps you back up and restore data.
Install and activate the disaster recovery gateway
After you download the gateway and certificate, you need to install the gateway in your VMware environment. After the gateway is installed, you can create backup and restore jobs in the Cloud Backup console.
Before you back up VMware VMs, you must add a vCenter Server in the Cloud Backup console.
In the Cloud Backup console, create a backup plan and configure the plan name, backup cycle, and retention period. Cloud Backup starts the backup plan and continuously backs up data from the selected VMware VMs.
If an exception occurs in a VMware VM, you can create a restore job to restore the VMware VM to an on-premises server, an ECS instance, or the vCenter environment of ACVS.
Costs
The VMware backup and disaster recovery feature incurs the following main costs:
VMware backup software usage fee: Cloud Backup charges a VMware backup software usage fee based on the total provisioned size of the virtual disks of the backed-up VMware VMs.
Storage capacity fee: This fee is calculated based on the actual backup vault capacity consumed by the backup data.
You can view detailed data on the Overview page of the Cloud Backup console.
For specific prices of billable items, see Pricing.
Cloud Backup may also incur other costs for specific backup configurations or operations:
Outbound traffic costs: When you restore data to an on-premises server over the Internet, you incur outbound Internet traffic costs. These costs are based on the amount of data transferred.
If you restore a backed-up VMware VM as an ECS image, the corresponding fees for the intermediate ECS instance, image, snapshot, and disk are charged by the ECS service. For more information about billing, see ECS Product Billing.
What to do next
Learn about the preparations for VMware backup and disaster recovery (on-premises VMware environment) and preparations (Alibaba Cloud VMware Service).
Learn about Cloud Backup best practices.