REAL Self-Service Backup for vCloud

Our good friend, Massimo, recently blogged about challenges backing up vCloud. The fact is that until Acronis Backup & Recovery for vCloud came along, no solutions existed that would allow tenants to backup and recover their virtual machines on their own, with self-service, without manual operations from vCloud administrators.

VMware vCloud Director is built on top of vSphere, and basically adds multi-tenancy and self-service capabilities to vSphere, meaning that tenants can manage their virtual machine on their own, but do not have any access or visibility of hardware.

This is a great step toward transformation to infrastructure-as-a-service (whether it’s public cloud provider or enterprise). However, what’s currently missing in vCloud is backup. By default it is simply not possible for tenants to backup vCloud virtual machines. Proper vCloud backup should:

1.       Integrate with vCloud to ensure vCloud objects are also backed up and restored, not only virtual machines disks

2.       Provide self-service for tenants for both backup and restore

Acronis Backup & Recovery for vCloud is the first solution that does it both. 

There are other tools claiming integration with vCloud – but none really offer self-service for both backup and recovery.

How it works? The cloud “owner” deploys Acronis Backup & Recovery for vCloud on their servers, and provides it with both vSphere and vCloud credentials. Then it’s possible to select organization that will have access to the management web console, choose their quotas, available options and backup location. Once this is done, the tenants will be able to log into simple web portal with their vCloud credentials, see their vApps and VMs, back up, or restore. Sounds amazing? Yes, it does.