This topic describes the VMware backup and disaster recovery feature of Cloud Backup, including its benefits, how it works, the procedure, and billing for backing up on-premises VMware virtual machines (VMs) and VMs on Alibaba Cloud VMware Service (ACVS).
Introduction
VMware backup and disaster recovery is a virtual machine (VM) protection solution provided by Cloud Backup for on-premises VMware environments and VMs on Alibaba Cloud VMware Service (ACVS). You can back up entire VMs to the cloud in a simple, secure, and reliable way. If your on-premises data center fails, a VM goes down, production data is accidentally deleted, or you experience a virus attack, you can restore the entire VM from the backup vault. You can restore the VM to your on-premises VMware environment, ACVS, or an Alibaba Cloud ECS instance. This provides disaster recovery for your business systems and ensures data security and business continuity.
This feature has certain limitations. 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. You do not need to purchase separate hardware.
Agentless
You do not need to install a client in the VM operating system. You only need to deploy one or more backup gateways in your 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 an ECS instance. This ensures both data security and business continuity.
Source-side deduplication and compression
The Cloud Backup backup gateway compresses and deduplicates your source data. This saves bandwidth during cloud migration and reduces storage consumption after the data is in the cloud.
Immutable backups to prevent accidental deletion
Cloud Backup provides a vault-based immutable backup feature. Backup data cannot be deleted by any account or by any method before the configured retention period expires.
How it works
VMware vCenter is advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform to control vSphere environments and delivers full visibility and management across a hybrid cloud. You can deploy and activate the Cloud Backup VMware disaster recovery gateway in the vCenter that you want to back up using the Open Virtualization Appliance (OVA) template provided by Cloud Backup. You need to deploy only one gateway for each vCenter environment. You can deploy multiple gateways for large-scale environments. The gateway backs up VMs according to the backup plan.
When a backup job runs, the backup gateway creates a snapshot of the specified VM. It then reads the snapshot data using the official VMware software development kit (SDK). After data reduction operations, such as data deduplication and compression, are performed, the data is uploaded 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 data that has changed since the last backup. A complete full backup is then synthesized in the cloud to reduce network bandwidth and storage consumption. Cloud Backup also supports the official VMware incremental API. It can directly read native incremental data to significantly reduce the amount of data transferred over the internal network.
Cloud Backup supports migration to Alibaba Cloud over the Internet, a VPN, or a leased line. To back up data over the Internet, the backup gateway only needs to access the Internet. You do not need to expose an IP address to the Internet.
Cloud Backup supports restoring VMware VM backup data as ECS images in Alibaba Cloud. You can clone all data of the source VM from a specific point-in-time backup. This enables VM-level disaster recovery and migration from your on-premises data center to the cloud.
When you restore a backed-up VMware VM as an ECS image, Cloud Backup automatically creates a temporary intermediate ECS instance to restore the 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, and only the ECS image is retained. You can create ECS instances from this image as needed to achieve data restoration and quickly reconstruct the system environment.
Procedure
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.
Billing
VMware backup and disaster recovery incurs the following two main types of fees:
VMware backup software usage fee
Cloud Backup charges VMware backup software usage fees based on the total provisioned size of the virtual disks of the backed-up VMware VMs. For more information, see Pricing.
Storage capacity fee
Cloud Backup provides locally redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS). You are charged based on the actual storage capacity that is consumed by your backup data in the backup vault. You can view detailed data on the Overview page of the Cloud Backup console. For more information, see Pricing.
In addition, Cloud Backup also incurs the following fees in specific backup configurations or operations:
Geo-redundancy fee
If you use the image repository feature to replicate backup vault data from one Alibaba Cloud region to another for geo-redundancy, you are charged for the storage capacity of the mirror vault and for cross-region replication traffic. The storage capacity fee and pricing model of the mirror vault are the same as those of the source backup vault. These fees are charged based on the amount of data that is replicated.
Outbound traffic fee
If you restore data to an on-premises server over the Internet, you are also charged for outbound Internet traffic. This fee is charged based on the amount of data that is transferred.
If you restore a backed-up VMware VM as an ECS image, the fees for the intermediate ECS instance, image, snapshot, and disks are charged by the ECS service. For more information about the billing standards, 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 the best practices of Cloud Backup.