For a customer project, I was looking for backup software with support for XenServer. Unfortunately, during my search, I discovered that not many vendors support hypervisors other than VMware and Microsoft. Nevertheless, I found a good solution and will discuss it briefly in this blog. Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a software backup solution that provides Backup and Disaster Recovery capabilities for virtual environments, with support for a wide range of hypervisors. 

Founded in 2015, Vinchin is a professional provider of data protection solutions for enterprises. 

Installation

Software installation begins with filling out a form on the official website. Next, you download an ISO image, and the activation key will be in your inbox. Mount the ISO image to a virtual machine you’ve created before and walk through the installation steps. These are pretty straightforward.

The basic requirements are as follows:

• 4 vCPUs or more
• 8GB of memory or more
• 100 GB of storage (or more) for installation of the software
• 1.5 the amount of the production capacity size for backup storage

(As always.. the more resources, the better the performance 😊)

After installation, reboot the server (don’t forget to unmount the ISO) and log on to the web interface. This interface is simple and easy to use. All the necessary information is present, and it looks very clean.

All tasks can be set quickly and speak for themselves. I also like the reporting tools.

As I mentioned, Vinchin has support for multiple hypervisors :

• VMware – vSphere 4.x to 7.0
• Microsoft – Hyper-V 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, Server 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, Windows 10
• Citrix – Hypervisor 8.x, XenServer 6.x, 7.x
• Redhat – RHV/oVirt 4.x
• Oracle – Oracle Linux, Virtualization Manager 4.3
• OpenStack – Mitaka, Victoria
• and more

Must backup vendors only support VMware and Microsoft, but Vinchin has support for a wide range of vendors. It’s also possible to back up a combination of hypervisors. So, for instance when you use XenServer next to VMware. You can use a Vinchin as your only backup solution. You don’t have to manage (and license!) multiple backup tools. If you need to quickly restore the business from a crashed virtualization to another in a multi-hypervisor environment in less than 1 minute, the feature is just the one you need most. Its configurations are also as simple as that of a full restore job.

Vinchin is a (fully certified) image-based backup solution (snapshot technology) with no need to install any agent on the VM. It uses the API interface from the Hypervisor. There is support for full backup, incremental, and differential backups.

Incremental backups take advantage of CBT and SpeedKit technologies improving performance and reducing the time required to complete the backup job. This is a very clever technology only to back up the blocks that have been changed. This increases the backup speeds.

Data is also deduplicated and compressed to save storage space before writing to the backup repository and transferring from production to the backup repository. There is support for FC, iSCSI and NFS protocols. (I’m currently performance testing the different types of storage protocols and will blog about this later)

You can also use a backup copy job to copy your backup data to an alternative location. It is possible to archive your backup data to multiple Cloud platforms to free up storage.

You can opt for file-level backups within Windows and Linux servers using an agent on the target OS. Using this technique, you can quickly back up and restore files within an OS.

Vinchin has all the features other vendors offer, like instant VM Recovery, full VM, and file level recovery. It’s also possible to restore files/backups to another hypervisor (from XenServer to VMware, for example)

There is support for the following databases (which I’m currently testing) :

• MySQL (5.5 and later)
• Microsoft SQL Server (2008 and later, standalone & Clusters)
• Oracle Database (11G and later, only standalone) Vinchin Backup & Recovery comes in 4 editions:
• Free (support for 3 VMs)
• Essential (support for VMware and Hyper-V platforms)
• Standard (support for VMware, Hyper-V, XensServer and/or KVM platforms)
• Enterprise (oriented for medium to large organizations provides all available features)

To compare available editions, check out this page on the Vinchin website. There are two licensing options available. You can choose between perpetual licenses (based on the number of physical CPUs) and subscription licenses (based on the number of VMs you wish to protect). Using the subscription license, you can save on your license costs when you choose a 1-3 year subscription.

Conclusion

My first impression is that Vinchin Backup & Recovery has a great deal to offer. Installation and configuration is straightforward and intuitive. There is support for all the necessary features, database support, and configuration options (like archiving, copy jobs etc.). I’ve tested it with multiple types of hypervisors, and it works the same way. The backup and restore times are more or less the same as with other vendors. It would be nice if version differentiation was done on feature support, not hypervisor support. For example, when you want XenServer support, you must choose Standard or above. It would also be nice for the free version to support more than 3 VMs (other vendors have support for 10 VMs with their free versions) and all hypervisors.  I’ve spoken with a colleague who has been working with Vinchin for more than a year. He was very enthusiastic about the stability and the improvements that have been made.  Vinchin Backup & Recovery offers a 60-day full-featured trial. Download to experience its ease of use and efficiency yourself!