This topic provides an overview of the VMware backup and disaster recovery feature of Cloud Backup, including the benefits, working principles, procedure, and billing of the feature. You can back up on-premises VMware virtual machines (VMs) and VMs deployed on Alibaba Cloud VMware Service (ACVS).
Introduction
VMware backup and disaster recovery is a VM protection solution provided by Alibaba Cloud Cloud Backup for on-premises VMware VMs and VMs deployed on ACVS. You can back up VMs to an Cloud Backup vault in a simple, secure, and reliable manner. If your on-premises data center fails, a VM crashes, data is accidentally deleted in the production system, or the VM encounters ransomware attacks, you can restore the VM from the Cloud Backup vault to the on-premises VMware environment, ACVS, or an ECS instance. This ensures disaster recovery of your business system and ensures data security and business continuity.
This feature has some limits. For more information, see Limits.
Benefits
No hardware investment
Cloud Backup backs up VMware VMs from on-premises environments to the cloud. You do not need to purchase hardware devices.
No client installation
You do not need to install the Cloud Backup client on the VM operating system. You only need to deploy one or more backup gateways in your VMware environment.
Integration of backup and disaster recovery
After a VM is backed up, it can be restored back to the on-premises VMware environment, ACVS, or an ECS instance. This ensures data security and business continuity.
Deduplication and compression
When Cloud Backup backs up VMs, the backup gateway compresses and deduplicates the source data. This minimizes the bandwidth of backing up data to the cloud and the storage space occupied by the backup data.
Immutable backup against accidental deletion
Cloud Backup provides the immutable backup feature based on backup vaults. Backup data cannot be deleted by any account or method before the configured retention period expires.
How it works
You must deploy and activate the disaster recovery gateway by using the Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) template provided by Cloud Backup on the vCenter Server where the backup is performed. You need to deploy only one gateway on each vCenter Server. If you have a large number of VMs, you can also deploy multiple gateways. The gateway backs up VMs based on the backup plan that you configure.
When a backup plan is running, the backup gateway creates snapshots for the specified VMs, reads data by using VMware SDKs, compresses and deduplicates the source data, and then uploads the data to the cloud. Cloud Backup automatically merges incremental backups. Except for the first full backup job, each subsequent backup job uploads only the data that has changed compared with the previous backup job. A complete full backup is synthesized on the cloud to minimize network and storage consumption. Cloud Backup supports the official incremental interface of VMware. Cloud Backup can directly read native incremental data. This greatly reduces the volume of data transferred over the internal network.
Cloud Backup allows you to back up data to Alibaba Cloud over the Internet, virtual private networks (VPNs), or Express Connect circuits. If you back up data over the Internet, you must make sure that the backup gateway can access the Internet. You do not need to expose the IP addresses of the gateway to the Internet.
Cloud Backup allows you to create an ECS instance based on a VMware VM that is backed up on Alibaba Cloud. You can clone the data of a VMware VM at a specific point in time. This helps you implement VM disaster recovery from data centers to the cloud.
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 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 the gateway is activated, 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.
When you create a backup plan, configure the plan name, backup cycle, and retention period. Cloud Backup starts the backup plan and continuously backs up data from the selected VMs.
If an exception occurs in a VMware VM, you can create a recovery job to restore the VMware VM to an on-premises server 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.
When you create a backup plan, configure the plan name, backup cycle, and retention period. Cloud Backup starts the backup plan and continuously backs up data from the selected VMs.
If an exception occurs in a VMware VM, you can create a recovery job to restore the VMware VM to an on-premises server or the vCenter environment of ACVS.
Billing
You are charged for VMware backup and disaster recovery based on the following billable items:
Cloud Backup clients for VMware backup
You are charged for Cloud Backup clients based on the total virtual disk size (Provisioned Size) of the VMware VMs that are backed up. For more information, see Pricing.
Storage usage
Cloud Backup provides two types of backup storage: locally redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS). You are charged based on the storage usage of the Cloud Backup vaults. You can view the storage usage of backup vaults on the Overview page in the Cloud Backup console. For more information, see Pricing.
In addition, Cloud Backup charges the following fees based on specific configurations or operations:
Geo-redundancy fees
If you create a remote mirror vault to copy data from a backup vault in an Alibaba Cloud region to another region for geo-redundancy, you are charged for the storage capacity of the mirror vault and the cross-region replication traffic. The size of the mirror vault is the same as that of the source backup vault, and the pricing is the same. Traffic fees are calculated based on the data volume.
Outbound traffic fees
If you restore data to an on-premises server over the Internet, you are charged for the outbound traffic. Traffic fees are calculated based on the data volume.
If you restore a VMware VM to an ECS instance, the ECS and disk fees are included into the ECS service bills.
What to do next
Learn about how to back up VMware VMs. For more information, see Before you begin (on-premises VMware) and Before you begin (ACVS).
Learn about the best practices of Cloud Backup. For more information, see Best Practices.