Legacy VM Backup vs. Native VM Backup
Today’s modern VMware backup solutions offer powerful backup and replication features for the enterprise data center environment. When we think about how far we have come with backup technologies and compare them with the legacy backup solutions of days past, we see the tremendous advantages of using a “native” VM backup solution over a “legacy” VM backup solution. What are legacy VM backup solutions, and what do they do when it comes to backing up virtual machines? What are native backup solutions in this regard? How do these two compare, and why do we want to use a native VM backup solution?
Legacy VM backup solutions are essentially the same backup solutions that have been used on physical workloads for years and then moved over to virtual machines. The same technology, tools, and methodologies are used with virtual machines as with physical machines. Typically, we may think about a “backup agent” being installed inside the guest operating system for the backup solution to be able to back up virtual machines. Suppose the legacy solution is able to utilize (even in a crude way) the VMware data protection APIs. In that case, they generally still need some sort of agent to be able to perform application-aware backups or granular file restores.