vSphere Data Protection Appliance

Backup is the process of copying and archiving the data so that it can be used to restore the original data if the data is lost. In vSphere environments, the vSphere Data Protection (VDP) appliance is an efficient and feature-rich tool for backup and restore. In this section, we will have a deeper look at managing backup and restore scenarios with VDP.

VDP is fully integrated with vCenter Server and provides agentless, disc-based backups of virtual machines.

It requires no additional software installation because it uses the vSphere Storage API for Data Protection API built inside the ESXi framework. It provides plenty of features, including:

• Backing up the virtual machine guest operating system without creating temporary files in the virtual machine
• Restoring individual files and also application data such as Exchange mailboxes or Microsoft SQL Server databases
• Doing incremental backups

VDP ensures fast and efficient backups of virtual machines even if the virtual...