Q&A: Top Questions About VMware Backup

Enterprise adoption of x86 server virtualization is mainstream. Deployment is no longer limited to application development and testing environments, and chances are your organization is virtualizing mission- and business-critical production environments. In addition, many large organizations now have hundreds or thousands of virtual machines to manage. How can you efficiently back up hundreds of virtual machines that contain critical corporate data? Today, VMware is the most widely deployed x86 server virtualization technology and leads the market with third-party backup tools as well. Forrester regularly receives calls about how best to back up large VMware environments. What have we found? IT managers should default to VMware's Consolidated Backup (VCB) as the best option today, but don't hesitate to explore specialized tools and storage-specific functionality — both of which have come a long way to support VM-specific intelligence. To detail this further, here are our answers to the most common questions.