vProtect Guide – Snapshot Management

Virtual machine snapshots capture the entire state of the virtual machine at the time the snapshot was taken. Snapshots are not an equivalent for backup but such feature is a good enhancement to the backup and point-in-time recovery functionality. Since snapshots are kept on the same repository as original VM, they are also prone to corruption or other threats. That’s why even snapshots need to be backed up (backup is exporting the data and storing it in a different location).

vProtect 3.9 supports snapshot management for Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware, Amazon EC2, Nutanix AHV, Proxmox, Red Hat Virtualization, oVirt, Citrix Hypervisor, xcp-ng.

This video will show you how to easily create, execute and revert snapshots using vProtect platform.

 

Why and when to use snapshots?

Snapshots are useful as an additional backup method for short-term or ad hoc backups if you need to restore previous state of VM, such as when applying patches or updating applications. But if there is a problem with your infrastructure – also your snapshots can be corrupted. If the storage system, or even the volume on which the snapshot is based, fails, all the backup snapshots associated with that system or volume are useless.

Backup allows you to replicate data snapshots to another system so they are stored in another repository.

Snapshots also have other limitations. Usually, they are not useful for restoring individual files because they only restore the entire virtual machine image to its current state. However, if you use a proper backup solution, like vProtect, it is possible to restore even individual files.

Tutorial with screens:

With vProtect, you can create separate snapshot management policies, define all the necessary information regarding time and frequency of snapshots, as well as the retention.

Steps Example screen
Create a snapshot management policy in vProtect. Enter: Policies / Snapshot Management / Create policy.
You can auto-assign VM using tags or regular expressions or pick one from the list, and create a rule.
Now you are also able to perform a snapshot on demand.
All actions are shown in the Task Console.
When we create a snapshot in vProtect, we can switch – in this case – to the vSphere console. We see that the snapshot is executed for the selected virtual machine.
You can revert the snapshot from the vProtect console. Enter: virtual environments and find the appropriate virtual machine.
In addition, you can edit the schedules for a specific policy and adapt it to your needs.