Release: PHD Virtual Backup 5.1

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After releasing a beta in November for Citrix XenServer this year, PHD has now released version 5.1 of its Virtual Backup product for VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer environments. The product is delivered as a Virtual Appliance which integrates into the console of XenCenter or vSphere client offering a single pane of glass.

PHD Virtual Backup can backup running and powered down VMs and VM Templates.

Both versions contain the following updates:

  • File Level Recovery – recover individual files or individual application objects using third-party application recovery tools, by creating and mounting iSCSI targets from your backup files. All file and folder permissions are maintained.
  • Backup archiving.
  • Expanded retention policies, including Keep All, Typical, and Custom options which allow you to configure thebackups to store by recent, days, weeks, months, years.
  • New Backup Data Connector which lets you create an export share to access backups in uncompressed formats.
  • Restore thin provisioned backups with their original settings
  • Data Streams – throttle the number of active streams during a job between 1 and 4.
  • Use Changed Block Tracking when backing up your VMs to backup only the data that changes between backups.
  • Option to turn off compression for backups
  • Store backups on CIFS and NFS shares in addition to attached virtual disks.
  • Exclude containers, VMs, or disks from your backup jobs.
  • Export backups as VMDK as well as VHD and RAW virtual disk formats to restore to multiple hypervisors.
  • Backup store monitoring and alerting.
  • New, faster compression for backups.
  • Improved snapshot model for more efficient use of space during backups.
  • Improved virtual machine disk restore speeds.

For the VMware version the following additional updates are applied:

  • Integration with vSphere Client 4.x
  • Job-based backup scheduling

The next version of PHD Virtual Backup will add support for Microsoft Hyper-V, and is expected to be released toward the end of Q1 2011, as confirmed by Brian Nason, Director of Product Marketing at PHD.