Free VMware Backup Solution and Software to Protect Your VMs

What is an effective VMware backup solution?

Data is an important part of any business today. To protect virtual machine data from disaster, administrators may choose from a variety of virtual machine backup solutions, following the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Taking VMware as an example, an effective VMware backup solution should have the following abilities:

• Keeping several copies of your VM data;
• Storing your VMware backups in multiple locations;
• Providing complete copies of your systems, down to every last document;
• Being independent and not relying on any single part of your internal infrastructure;
• Having the ability to backup applications inside VM as well, such as databases, ERP, CRM’s, etc.

To meet these conditions, it's best to create image-level backup of entire VMs. But as you may know, virtual machine backups (especially in enterprise environments) are often technically challenging and expensive. Is there any affordable or even free VMware backup solution?

In the following, I will introduce some methods you can try to free back up VMware VMs on ESXi.

Best free VMware backup software - AOMEI Cyber Backup

Although there are built-in features that can be used to backup VMware VMs, in these ways you can only manually backup multiple VMs one by one. This may be enough for one or two VMs on VMware Workstation, but for enterprises using VMware ESXi, it may not be sufficient.

Therefore, backup software is popular in this regard. For example, a free ESXi backup software AOMEI Cyber Backup, enables you to create backup tasks that cover multiple VMs, restore entire VMs, automate VM protection, and send email notifications if there's an error.

If you use free VMware ESXi, your options may have been limited by not supporting vStorage APIs. Don't worry, AOMEI Cyber Backup supports both paid and free ESXi.

You can use this free ESXi backup software to enjoy the following features:

Agentless VM Backup: create complete and independent image-level backup for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V VMs in a central console.
Support Free ESXi: support both paid and free versions of VMware ESXi.
Multiple Storage Destinations: you can save VM backups to local and external drive drives, NAS drives or network share, and Amazon S3 bucket.
Automated Execution: create backup schedules to automate backups daily, weekly, monthly.
Restore Entire VM: restore immediately available VMs from any selected restore points.
Role Assignment: allows one administrator to create sub-accounts with limited privileges.
Email Notification: send email notification when the task is completed or abnormal.
Perpetual Free: you can use AOMEI Cyber Backup Free Edition with no time limit.

Just click the following button to download the free VM backup software:

*You can choose to install this VM backup software on either Windows or Linux system.

How to backup VMware ESXi virtual machines for free with AOMEI Cyber Backup

You can centrally manage VMs on both VMware ESXi and Hyper-V host with AOMEI Cyber Backup. The supported versions are VMware ESXi 6.0 and later versions, Hyper-V in Windows 8/8.1/10/11, Windows Server/Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 and later versions.

Next, I will show you how to perform free VMware backup with AOMEI Cyber Backup.

Step 1. Bind Devices: Access to AOMEI Cyber Backup web client, navigate to Source Device > VMware > + Add VMware Device. Enter vCenter or Standalone ESXi host information to add your VMware ESXi virtual machines as the source device.  Click Confirm.

Step 2. Create Backup Task: Navigate to Backup Task > + Create New Task, and then set Task Name, Backup Type, Device, Target, Archive, and Schedule according to your need.

• Device: cover multiple VMs on the host within one backup task.
• Target: select to back up to a local path, or a network path.
• Schedule: choose to perform full, differential, or incremental backup, and automate execution according to your specified backup schedule.
• Archive: Add an Amazon Object storage, and save backup files to it.

Step 3. Run Backup: Click Start Backup and select Add the schedule and start backup now, or Add the schedule only.

Created backup tasks will be listed and monitored separately, for restoring, progress checking, and schedule changing.

✦ While the Free Edition covers most of VM backup needs, you can also upgrade to Premium edition to enjoy more features, such as:
Batch VM backup: batch backup large numbers of VMs managed by vCenter Server or on standalone ESXi hosts.
Backup cleanup: Configure a retention policy to auto delete old backup files and save storage space.
Restore to new location: Create a new VM in the same or another datastore/host directly from the backup, saving the trouble of re-configuring the new VM.

Other free VMware backup solutions

In addition, there are other ways - Manually downloading VM files and exporting VM of OVA/OVF can also resume your VM environment. But you should know that they are not replacements of robust VM backup software. They don't ensure consistency and data integrity. And they don't offer features like automatic backup, centralized backup, etc. 

When you need to migrate a VM migration or other simple VM backup needs, these 2 methods can be a good choice.

Manually download VM files

You can use the VMware ESXi web client to download all the VM files, such as the VMDK virtual disk file and VMX configuration file from the datastore. When you need to restore a VM environment, you can upload these files and employ a new VM.

• Power off your VM. On the ESXi client, go to Storage > choose your datastore name and click Files. 

• Choose your VMDK file and click Download.

Export VM to OVF/OVA

Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is a file format that supports the exchange of virtual appliances across products and platforms. You can achieve faster downloads this way, but still need to export VM from ESXi individually.

• Power off the VM you want to export. right-click on the VM and click Export.

• Select related files, and the destination, then export it.

Summary

Virtual machine backup is an important VM data protection measure, that ensures you to recover data in time in case of disasters. As VMware ESXi is a widely used type-1 hypervisor, you may also want to backup VMware ESXi VMs for better data security.

In this article, I introduced 3 free VMware backup solutions. As for VMware ESXi, it is commonly agreed that backup software with automation features can better manage large amount of VMs. You can try AOMEI Cyber Backup. Its Free Edition covers all basic features, including create auto backup schedules.