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NAKIVO Backup & Replication has historically been a solution for backing up and replicating VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machines (VMs). Version 7 introduces support for Hyper-V backup for Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V virtualization hosts.
In today's article, I'll focus specifically on NAKIVO Backup & Replication v7's new features. Please read my prior product review if you need general information on this product.
Hyper-V backups in a nutshell
In the NAKIVO Backup & Replication management console, add your Hyper-V hosts the very same way you've done for your AWS EC2 VMs and VMware vCenter/ESXi hosts. You then step through the New Backup Job Wizard as usual, but this time you're backing up Hyper-V VMs. I show you this interface in the following screenshot.
Creating a Hyper V backup job
NAKIVO automatically compresses and deduplicates your Hyper-V backups to save disk space. You can use the same backup repository to store Hyper-V, VMware, and AWS EC2 VMs.
As for replication, you certainly can use NAKIVO to replicate your Hyper-V VMs to a remote target, either on premises or in the AWS public cloud.
From a VMware perspective, NAKIVO Backup & Replication v7 now supports vSphere 6.5. This is good news for VMware administrators because v6.5 was a major product release and a widely adopted one.
The licensing model requires that you license each physical CPU socket for each participating VMware or Hyper-V virtualization host included in your backup jobs. For AWS, you license per each EC2 instance in your backup jobs. You do not need to license target servers for your backups and replicated VMs.
Skip swap file feature
You almost never want to include the swap file (also called the paging file or the virtual memory file) in your backups. Talk about unnecessarily wasted space in your backup archives!
NAKIVO Backup & Replication v7 now has a setting called Skip swap files and partitions during processing that can save you an immense amount of space. In the NAKIVO admin console, navigate to General > System Settings as shown in the following screenshot to enable the setting.
Configuring the skip swap file feature
Active Directory integration
This new product feature lets you map your Active Directory (AD) users and groups to NAKIVO Backup & Replication user roles. This means your virtualization backup administrators can log into the NAKIVO web console using their AD domain credentials instead of having a second credential set.
Configure AD integration in the NAKIVO console by navigating to General > Active Directory Integration as shown in the following interface screenshot.
Configuring AD integration
Activities view
This new feature gives NAKIVO Backup & Replication administrators a "bird's eye view" of product control plane activities, including job runs and restores. Your compliance officers may indeed benefit from these reports! I show you an interface screenshot in the following figure.
Activity auditing from the NAKIVO web console
Bulk delete backups
NAKIVO Backup & Replication v7 makes it easier to clean up your backup repositories by deleting multiple VM backups simultaneously. You can do this in the NAKIVO console by navigating to Repositories > Manage > Delete backups in bulk. The following criteria allow you to locate candidate backups for deletion:
- All backups not belonging to any job
- All backups not belonging to any job and older than n days
- All recovery points older than n days
- All corrupted recovery points
Final thoughts
Many of the businesses I work with have at least some Hyper-V infrastructure even if they are mostly a VMware shop. It's great news for these businesses that they can now use a single solution to manage backups, replication, and restores for their entire infrastructure.
Someday I'd like to see NAKIVO Backup & Replication support Microsoft Azure VMs to the same degree of parity that it does AWS EC2 instances. Currently you can use Azure VMs as an on-demand offsite backup destination.
Besides the Hyper-V support, what I like the most about NAKIVO Backup & Recover are its:
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- Easy-to-use web console
- Command-line interface—it's not PowerShell, but it at least gives you some ability to automate programmatically
- Effective deduplication and backup encryption
Download a free trial by visiting the NAKIVO website.
