Best Free Enterprise Backup Software for Virtual Environment

For many years, numerous industries have relied heavily on the computing resources provided by physical servers - you can imagine the classic picture of huge server rooms and bulky servers.

However, as business has grown at a rapid pace, many organizations have found that physical servers are no longer an efficient use of computing resources. As a result, virtual servers have been introduced out of concern for cost savings.

With virtualization, an abstraction layer is added between bare metal and the operating system. You can use a hypervisor to allocate specified computing resources, and run multiple virtual machines (VMs) at the same time.

But no matter if it is a physical or a virtual machine, data protection is always a topic that cannot be bypassed. If you don't want to risk business interruption and vital data loss, introducing a reliable enterprise backup solution is a must.

Main challenges of picking enterprise backup software

Compared to individual users, enterprise users have not only more personnel and machines, but also a greater volume of data and a greater possibility of human error.

At the same time, the related backup solutions on the market have become significantly more expensive and more difficult to use.

Especially for non-profit organizations and small start-ups, the elevated price and high barrier to use may exclude many popular products from the options.

Meanwhile, the data protection features that come with the hypervisor (such as snapshots or export & import) are hardly sufficient to meet the backup needs of some practices, such as unattended backup and centralized management.

Putting all this together, you would probably like to try a free solution that can cover your basic virtual machine backup needs.

Review: Free enterprise backup software for VMware & Hyper-V

AOMEI Cyber Backup is an enterprise-oriented backup software developed by AOMEI, an experienced brand deeply rooted in the backup industry. You may have heard about its previous flagship products such as AOMEI Backupper and AOMEI Partition Assistant.

And just like these older products, AOMEI Cyber Backup offers robust backup capabilities while maintaining their usual simplicity and usability. It enables you to backup VMware or Hyper-V virtual machines from a central console, saving you much time and administrative cost.

After logging into a simple web console, you can add VMware (ESXi host or vCenter) or Hyper-V devices to back up and restore virtual machine agentlessly. Here are some points I like about it.

Free to use

Not only a free demo, AOMEI offers a perpetual free edition to download and use. It covers most of basic features and supports up-to 10 virtual machine (not tied to any host) of VMware or Hyper-V.

If you don't have a large number of virtual machines, then hopefully, you can always enjoy this free edition. If you want to demonstrate all the implemented functions, there’s also a fully functional 30-day trial available.

Streamlined central console

Like many enterprise backup software, AOMEI Cyber Backup has a centralized web console. Its intuitive interface and interaction allows even novices to set up a backup system and monitor daily tasks without any problems.

vCenter and free ESXi supported

For VMware backup, you can not only add standalone ESXi host, but also vCenter Server or even free ESXi (which usually does not support central management due to the lack of storage API).

Automated backup and cleanup

The ability to perform unattended backup is indispensable. For those virtual machines running critical business, it’s not recommended to back them up during working hours. Instead, you can create backup schedules to run the backup at night or at weekends.

You can also create a retention policy to keep backups up to date and remove old backup versions automatically.

Restore from any point

AOMEI Cyber Backup enables you to restore an entire VM from any full or incremental/differential backup point based on accurate data mapping and change block tracking.

And besides in-place recovery, you can choose to restore a VM in-place to a usable state or create an identical VM from a backup to another location for VM cloning or migration.

Backup scalability

For growing enterprises, the number of business and devices is likely to expand at any time, so the backup solution should also be sufficiently scalable to better handle the growth in data volume.

If your business grows rapidly so that 10 virtual machines are not enough to meet demand, you could also upgrade AOMEI Cyber Backup to support more devices. It provides several plans (from customized VMs to unlimited) to suit different user groups, and the prices are considerably affordable.

In a nutshell, AOMEI Cyber Backup is a great VM backup solution for small businesses and organizations. It may not be the most feature-rich on the market at this stage, but its cost effectiveness and ease of operation significantly lowers the barrier to enterprise data backup, making it simple for anyone, even a novice to protect virtual environments.