Altaro released the version 7 of their Altaro VM Backup product with some great new features. Let’s take a look at these new features.
What’s new in v7?
- Backup to Azure
With VM Backup v7, users can store their Offsites Copies in Azure. They can simply enter their account details and use their Microsoft Azure Cloud Storage Account. Of course, they can also restore from Azure. Backup to Azure is only available if you have the “Unlimited Plus” edition of Altaro VM Backup. A picture is worth a thousand words, let’s see the following schema from Altaro that describes how Azure Backup works:
- Altaro Cloud Management Console for End Users
Monitor and manage all your Altaro VM Backup installations from a single online console using a simple web browser. IT administrators have complete control over backup and restore jobs in real-time, via a single cloud console. IT Admins can for example: Start backups, configure backup locations, restore VMs directly from the online portal. In order to configure the CMC, you just have to click on the following icon:
- Concurrency
Here is a great update because you can now run more simultaneous backups by allowing more VMs to be backed up at the same time.
- Backup Health Monitor
Another great update is the Health Monitor which will help you to ensure that your backup are successfully completing. If issues are found the Healt Monitor will attempt to resolve the issues automatically by backing up the affected data again during the next backup.
- Support for vSphere 6.5
vSphere 6.5 is now supported in Altaro VM Backup v7
- Augmented Inline Deduplication
Here is a new feature called ‘Augmented Inline Deduplication’. IT Admins know the deduplication process but here is a great improvement because Inline deduplication will be done in real time (instead of Post-Process Deduplication) and you don’t need to group Virtual Machines together. This feature reduces the amount of storage needed to store backups.
- Boot from Backup
Here it is a ‘Must have’ feature! You can instantly boot any VM version from the backup location. There are two options available, ‘Verification Mode’ or ‘Recovery Mode’. The verification mode is just to verify your backup. The second option is to start a virtual machine directly from the backup, but also performing a full recovery of that virtual machine.
Below is the interface:
- A brand new look for the Altaro Offsite Server
The Altaro Offsite Server is used to replicate Hyper-V and VMware backups to an offsite location.
- Faster compression algorithms
Altaro VM Backup v7 is now using compression algorithms that leverage processors’ multithreading and arithmetic abilities to give a boost to the backup speed and drastically lowers the CPU requirements of the backup process.
Installation & configuration
If you want to install and configure ALTARO VM Backup v7, you can read and follow my first review. Installing Altaro VM Backup is very easy and you won’t need much time to get set. All it takes is a server running Hyper-V or VMware and you can be up and running in just 15 minutes.
You can notice that ALTARO VM Backup has been completely redeveloped with a brand-new look. But the installation wizard of VM Backup v7 is as simple as the previous versions.
So open the EXE installer and run through the simple “Next, Next, and Finish” wizard in order to install VM Backup.
Once the installation is done, you can open the management console and select “Connect”:
Now you can configure Altaro VM Backup v7 depending your environment.
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