What's new in V9 of VM Backup?

Ransomware attacks are on a continuous rise, and it is more important than ever to protect your data from cybercriminals. VM Backup 9 offers ransomware protection by leveraging immutable backups on cloud object storage, which assures that data cannot be erased, modified, or deleted by anyone for a set duration.

Benefits include:

• Tamper-Proof backup data whilst it is under the defined immutable policy.
• Peace of mind from ransomware attacks.
• Extra layer of security over and above the existing offsite storage functionality.
• No need to retain unnecessary data and incur high costs as retention operates seamlessly on the cloud repository.

Microsoft has released the next iteration of Windows Server in the form of Windows Server 2022, the successor to Windows Server 2019, as well as a new operating system, Azure Stack HCI (21H2). VM Backup now supports these operating systems, as follows:

• Full support for all backup, restore, and replication features for virtual machines residing on (Hyper-V) hosts running Windows Server 2022 or Azure Stack HCI as their operating system.
• Support for installing and running VM Backup and our Offsite Server on a server running Windows Server 2022 or Azure Stack HCI as their operating system.

With the latest release of VM Backup, customers can now choose whether to buy a perpetual license (as has been the case so far) or subscribe, with the ability to purchase a pre-paid annual or multi-year subscription.

Subscription services make it simpler to manage and predict expenses, more affordable and easier to obtain approval for as they fall under OpEx rather than CapEx.

While perpetual licensing is per Host, subscribers pay per VM and can move VMs across hosts with no restraints. A subscription includes 24/7 technical support, all the latest features and any patch fixes. Access to the product ends once the subscription expires unless it is renewed.

All other aspects of VM Backup, such as functionality and editions, remain unchanged. For a comparison between editions and a pricing calculator for both purchasing models, please click here.

So far, VM Backup (formerly Altaro VM Backup) customers wanting to back up VMs to a cloud storage provider could only natively do so to Microsoft Azure. Now with v8.5 and up, users now have the option to back up VMs to two other cloud storage providers, Amazon S3 and Wasabi, with full native integration between them and VM Backup.

End users simply need to input their access credentials for VM Backup to securely and seamlessly handle the data transfers, without requiring any additional resources running in the cloud to provide backup storage.

Wasabi cloud storage is a highly attractive backup option for customers with tighter budgets due to its simple, predictable pricing model with no egress fees or API call fees.

With VM Backup 7.6, users can switch from running daily backups to a continuous data protection model yielding an improved Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of up to 5 minutes.

When CDP is enabled, VMs can be backed up as frequently as every 5 minutes or the maximum frequency permitted by the backup location and environment. This ensures that in a data loss scenario only a few minutes of data would be lost.

This dramatically reduces the Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RPO is the point in time to which VMs are restored by a backup solution in case of a disaster. With CDP in place, users' RPO is optimized to up to 5 minutes, instead of the hours of data loss faced in cases where users are simply running daily backups.