Recently I have received some questions about supporting VMware by backup solutions such Veritas NetBackup, EMC Networker etc. so I decided to write a short post to answer.
Almost backups solutions use VDDK to protect VMs on VMware. What is VDDK?
The Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) is a collection of C/C++ libraries, code samples, utilities, and documentation to help you create and access VMware virtual disk storage. The VDDK is useful in conjunction with the vSphere API for writing backup and recovery software, or similar applications.
You do not need to check every time whether for example Symantec NetBackup 7.6.1 supports VMware 5.5. You just need to know which VDDK is supported by NetBackup. The VMware policy concerning backward and forward compatibility is for VDDK to support N-2 and N+1 releases. In other words, VDDK 5.5 and all of its update releases support vSphere 5.0, 5.1, and 6.0 (except new features). It means that Veritas NetBackup 7.6.1 supports at least 5.0, 5.1, 5.5 with all updates and vSphere 6.0 without new features.