Backing up your virtual environment does not have to be as challenging as it seems. Actually if you do it right it should be rewarding when compared with physical servers backup. You can restore VM from images backup much easier than you ever did with physical servers. Yes, you were able to restore physical servers from images backup as well but that had never been fun or easy to do. Restoring a physical machine from image backup had always meant fuzzing with drivers issues specially when using different hardware from the source. As virtual machines run independently from the physical hardware, they can be restored from images quickly to any host without caring about the hardware difference. This is alone is a huge advantage.…

As I have been exposed to Virtualization, Storage & Disaster recovery solutions for quite long, PHD Virtual has approached me to give a feedback on their latest PHD Virtual Backup and Replication v5.3.1 for VMware vSphere. As I had a couple of hours today, I decided to see what I can a accomplish in them messing around with PHD Virtual Backup and Replication v5.3.1 for VMware vSphere in my home lab. At this post I will document the features I like most of the product, what I believe missing as well a high level steps of how to use the product.

Let’s start with what I like about PHD Virtual Backup and Replication v5.3.1 for VMware vSphere. Being exposed to many of the other backup & replication solutions in the Virtualization market, I kinda was looking to what is different in this product from other products in the market that I have tried before.…