ALTARO VM BACKUP v7 Review

Altaro is a leading software provider in the market since 2009 and recognized in market for data protection solutions. Altaro has grown rapidly over the years and continues to do so with our flagship solution Altaro VM Backup, which is rapidly gaining traction as the natural choice for Hyper-V and VMware VM backups.

Altaro has various backup products and cloud services for small and medium businesses, which is cost effective and very convenient for customers. Altaro have 40,000 + small and mid-market business and 7,000 Partners in worldwide.

Altaro provides complete backup & replication solution for the VMware & Hyper-V. Altaro VM Backup mainly focused for SMB to provide complete solution for their virtual machines. Altaro VM Backup solution can deployed in an easy manner within minutes.

Altaro Solutions

Altaro VM Backup is a fast, affordable, high performance backup solution, specially developed for small and mid-market businesses. Altaro offers various solutions for your Organization, find the below solution details which is reliable and cost effective. One of my favorite feature about Altaro VM backup is the all the features available on Altaro VM Backup are available for VMware and Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Backup

Altaro VM Backup has the capability to backs up all VMs and applications compatible with Hyper-V VSS Writer.

VMware Backup

Altaro VM Backup for VMware has the flexibility and power to backup and replicate data to an offsite location or a removable drive, to be able to restore individual files or emails, to restore from different points in time, to verify backup integrity, etc.

Mixed Environments Backup

Monitor and manage all your Hyper-V and VMware hosts from a single console

Altaro VM Backup for MSPs

Apart from Altaro VM Backup, the company also offers a monthly subscription plan to enable MSPs to offer VM Backup as a service to their customers. This separate version, called Altaro VM Backup for MSPs, is built specifically for MSPs to manage and monitor all their customers’ virtual backups through an online console. MSP’s can create custom pricing model for customers, and access all Altaro VM Backup features across all customers.

Altaro VM Backup Cloud Management Console

Altaro CMC is a web-based, multi-tenant management tool by Altaro for complete control over all VM Backup & Restore management, monitor all the Altaro installations from a single pane of glass and provides centralized view that makes life easy and hassle-free. All IT departments, end users, IT Resellers and MSPs  can manage all Altaro VM backups through this  cloud console.

Great Feature by Altaro , I was able to do all backup management from CMC and to access this you don’t have to login to your network . CMC is accessible through internet and connection to you backup server is highly secured authentication key which gives access.

Key Features of Altaro VM Backup

Altaro has many great features which make Altaro a high performance backup solution .This review we have covered most of the best features of Altaro VM Backup , find the below key features of the Altaro VM Backup .

• VMware vSphere & Hyper-V supported within Single Solution
• Augmented Inline Deduplication
• Continuous Data Protection (CDP)
• Compressionand military grade Encryption
• Master Encryption Key
• Compatible with all Guest OS supported by VMware and Hyper-V including Linux VMs
• Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving (GFS)
• Concurrent backup Operation
• Cloud Backup to Azureand Other Public Cloud
• Instant boot VM from backup
• Granular RestoreOptions for full VM, Individual files and emails
• Restore an individual or a group of VMs
• Backup Health Monitor
• Fast OnePass Restore
• Offsite Backup replication for disaster recovery
• Exchange & SQL Support
• Supports Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV)
• Exclude attached ISO from VMs
• 3-2-1 Backup for More security
• Priced per host, not per CPU / socket / VM

Altaro VM Backup is one of the best cost-effective solution, which can be deployed quickly and complete configuration for VMware and Hyper-V environments. Let’s check some key features how useful for customers.

• Augmented Inline Deduplication – This is a unique deduplication technique by Altaro  to reduce the backup storage requirements on both local and offsite locations. This will help customers to perform backup very fast and this is the best deduplication technology in the industry. This feature will helps to create the smallest backup size compared to other backup vendors and result of lower storage requirements.

We performed backup tests in our Lab, the results are very good. Below are the results of the Job , Data backed up of the virtual                     machine in first backup had 57 % space saving and second one only changes are taken place and we got 76 % space saving and time             taken fo r the backup was really fast .

• Continuous Data Protection (CDP) – This feature will provide great high availably for customers by backing up date frequently as every 5 minutes through a continuous data protection model. This will significantly improving the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), this advanced option very helpful for customer to switch the schedule from daily backup jobs.

• Concurrency – Run efficient backup operations by allowing more VMs to be backed up at the same time, allowing you to drastically reduce your defined backup window.

• Instant Boot from Backup – This feature allow you to instantly boot any VM from Backup without affecting backup integrity. Booting VM from backup without full restore helps users to directly access vm without much downtime.

I have tested the features and it works perfectly without affecting any current environment, and I was able to verify that all data is available and test application worked. Tested application availability from same host, since I have disconnected the network to avoid the IP conflict.

• Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving (GFS) – Archive backup versions in addition to your continuous and daily backups, by setting up separate backup cycles so you can store a new backup version every week, every month, and every year.
• Backup to Azure and other public clouds  – Backup to an Azure Block Blob storage account, the most cost-effective Azure storage option. The Altaro Offsite Server, provided at no cost, can be installed on a VM in any cloud platform such as AWS and Google Storage, to act as a backup server in the cloud.

This features is one of the best for customers by Altrao , you can keep your data to Azure or any other supported cloud solution .I                 was able to offload one of my Virtual Machine to Azure and restore functionality is woks perfectly.

• Master Encryption Key –  The Master Encryption Key in Altaro is utilised to encrypt the backups using AES 256-bit. It’s used if you choose to encrypt the local backups from the ‘Advanced Settings’ screen, while if you’re configuring offsite copies it must be used as offsite copies must be encrypted.

Altaro VM Backup will require the encryption key upon restoring, so it’s critical that you either remember it or take note of it in a    secure password manager as there is no method of recovery for the master encryption key.

• Backup Health Monitor – This will ensure that always you have healthy backups, Altaro will proactively monitors the health of your backup storage, and any corruption be detected, the block(s) in question will be repaired automatically as part of the next backup job.

• 3-2-1 backup – You can achieve this with Altaro VM Backup. 1 copy of the original VM data, 1 onsite copy and 1 offsite backup per VM. .

Licensing Of Altaro VM Backup

Altaro VM Backup solution is available in three Editions for Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware or you can choose the edition for mixture of VMware and Hyper-V. In addition, Altaro provides a free edition of VM Backup for Micro Business.

• Free Edition          – This is a free edition for everyone to perform backup and restore of 2 VMs per host forever.
• Standard Edition  – This Edition will allow you to backup only five virtual machine per host.
• Unlimited Edition –  This Edition will support unlimited virtual machines backup and restored per host.
• Unlimited Plus Edition – This Edition has Unlimited edition Features plus Cloud Management Console and Cloud backup to Azure.

You can check the pricing for Altaro VM Backup solution here.

• Purchase includes indefinite/perpetual use of software including 1st year of free priority support and updates (SMA). SMA renewal after the first year is charged at 25% of the latest license price.
• For Unlimited Plus Edition, CMC access requires a valid SMA after 1st year charged at 25% of list price.

Finally we found that Altaro VM Backup is very cost-effective solution which is very easy to deploy by anyone and complete backup solution for virtual machines quickly .And the features provided by Altrao are great compared to the price.

Start Your Free Altaro VM Backup Trial Today

Download a fully functional 30-day trial of Altaro VM Backup (Unlimited Plus Edition), or download the Free Edition, free forever, for up to 2 VMs per host.