Backup ESXi: A Comprehensive Guide to Protecting Your Virtual Environment

What is ESXi?

ESXi/VMware ESXi is a virtualization tool that help users to install a bare-metal hypervisor onto a server and partition it into multiple virtual machines. As a bare-metal hypervisor, it allows multiple operating systems to run on a single physical server by creating and managing virtual machines.

Why Backups are Crucial for ESXi Environments?

VMware ESXi now is very important for some organizations and enterprises. They store a large volume of data and run important business on ESXi environments. Once a VMware environment encounters a hardware failure, cyber-attacks, other disaster. The result can be catastrophic leading to downtime, financial losses, and reputational damage.

With a valid and comprehensive ESXi backup, users can easily and quickly restore data to avoid loss.

Tips of Creating Backup Schedule

Daily vs. Weekly Backups: Determine the frequency of backups based on your data change rate and recovery point objectives (RPO). Daily backups are ideal for critical data, while weekly backups may suffice for less crucial information.

Retention Policies: Define how long backups should be retained. Balance storage costs with the need to maintain historical data for recovery and compliance purposes.

Regular Backup Verification: Verify backups regularly to ensure they are complete and usable. This involves checking logs, performing restores, and monitoring for anomalies.

Ensuring Backup Security: Encrypt backups to protect data from unauthorized access. Implement access controls and monitor backup activities to prevent breaches.

Best Recommended ESXi Backup Solution

AOMEI Cyber Backup is a powerful and reliable VMware backup solution. It enables users to easily create backups for multiple ESXi virtual machines and quick restore. This tool simplifies backup and recovery tasks, ensuring your virtual machines are protected with minimal effort.

Here are some key features and advantages of AOMEI Cyber Backup

• Automated Backup Scheduling: With flexible scheduling options, you can run your backup task daily, weekly, monthly according to your need. This way can reduce manual effort, minimize errors, and ensure consistent backup schedules.
• All backup methods: Support full backup, incremental backup, and differential backup. You can create an exact copy of selected data. Additionally, incremental backup and differential backup only backup changed data to save backup time and storage.
• Centralized Management: With a single dashboard, you can backup all VMs at once and centrally manage all backups.
• Role-based management: This feature helps you to create multiple account with different permission. It is very helpful for backup management of medium and large enterprises.
• Detailed log management: Access logs of backup, recovery, and other operations on dashboard. Besides, you can enable the Email Notification features, and you will receive Email for notifying successful backups, errors, and abnormalities.
• Restore to new location: When restoring a VM backup, you can restore to the original location. Also you can directly restore to another host, datastore to create an identical new VM.

How to backup VMware ESXi VMs with AOMEI Cyber Backup

Now just follow the steps below, we will guide you on how to use AOMEI Cyber Backup to backup ESXi VM with ease.

Step 1. Run AOMEI Cyber Backup. Click “Source Device” > “VMware” > “+ Add VMware” to add vCenter or Standalone ESXi host as the source device.

Step 2. Click “Backup Task” on the left pane> Choose “ Create New Task”, and then set Task Name, Backup Type, Device, Target, Schedule, and Cleanup and other settings based on your need.

Note:

Device: The devices that need to be backed up.

Target: Here you can choose to save backups to local path, or to a network path, NAS drive.

Schedule: Setup a schedule to run backup task according to your business condition. You can set up to run full backup, incremental backup, differential backup on daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

Step 3. Then you can click Start Backup button to commit and run the task.

Conclusion

Backing up ESXi environments is critical for maintaining business continuity and data integrity. Implementing effective backup strategies, choosing the right tools, and adhering to best practices are essential steps.

AOMEI Cyber Backup standout as an excellent enterprise backup solution. It offers an automated and smart way to protect ESXi data from loss. And AOMEI Cyber Backup offers multiple advanced features to make ESXi backup easy-to-use and meet all different backup requirements.