PHD Virtual released yesterday version 4.0 of its backup/restore solution for VMware virtual infrastructures.
The new build is primarily about performance: the company claims up to 20x faster backups thanks to the technology called Change Block Tracking (CBT).
By leveraging vSphere Change Tracking APIs, CBT only reads the blocks that have changed inside virtual disks, reducing the time to complete the backup.
Unfortunately CBT doesn’t work with templates, VMs with snapshots created before the activation of CBT, VMs with independent disks and Raw Device Mapping (RDM) LUNs.
esXpress 4.0 also includes support for IDE and SCSI VMDKs and the capability to restore virtual machines from the management GUI.
The latest esXpress release tracked by virtualization.info was 3.6, announced in July 2009.