As I mentioned in post about what’s new in vSphere 6.0, VMware announced that vSphere Data Protection Advanced will be included in Essentials+ or higher vSphere license! The features of VDPA are as follows:
- Scale up to 8Tb of deduplication (variable-length and global per appliance) storage as well as 400 VMs per VDP appliance.
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Support for up to 20 virtual appliances per VMware vCenter Server.
- Support guest-level backups of Microsoft SQL Servers (Clusters).
- Support guest-level backups of Microsoft Exchange Servers (DAG) or Sharepoint.
- Shorten backup windows by deploying up to eight proxies and performing up to 24 simultaneous backups without impacting network, CPU and memory usage.
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VSS support – enables consistent backups of virtual machines running VSS aware applications.
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EMC Data Domain (DD Boost) systems integration– increase scalability backing up to Data Domain using vSphere Data Protection Advanced as the front-end.
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Provide network-efficient, encrypted replication to replicate backups to one or more DR sites - vSphere Data Protection - Replication Target (VDP-RT).
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Multiple replication topologies – replicate in 1 to 1, 1 to many (fan-out) and many to 1 (fan-in) configurations.
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Multiple replication targets – Integration with EMC backup solutions offer choice for replication targets such as: EMC Data Domain or EMC Avamar.
Of course, vSphere Data Protection Advanced (VDPA) is a good product for SMB customers and in my opinion, enough for almost cases. I have some customers with VDP 5.8 installed and receive a really good feedbacks from them.
Do you use VDP or VDPA? Do you have positive or negative experience with VDP 5.5 or 5.8?