When enterprises trying to back up important data, what first comes to their mind must be efficiency, reliability and simple management. No matter for image-based or non-image based backup, any of the process can be able to run smoothly on a regular physical server, but how about in virtualized environments?
When virtualization had just started to take hold in the market, installing agent on VMs for backups seemed undoubtedly right. But with virtual machine gradually developing to be the basic element of modern data centers, this strategy can be expensive and laborious.
Agentless backup was then designed to help. By performing backups without cumbersome per-server agents, from a single administration point, disk-to-disk backup can be done cost-effectively. However, there also some things that only agent-based backup can do. Chance given by technology, we’re now able to choose between agent-based and agentless backup for VM protection. Which is better? Let’s have a look.
What are the advantages of Agentless Backup?
Less time-consuming. Agentless backup does not require agent installed on each VM. For dozens of hundreds of VMs, the agent installation is no doubt lengthy. Agentless backup eliminates this kind of lengthy procedure and can start to run backup jobs immediately without having to reboot host after each agent installation.
More cost-effective. This is one of the highlight advantages of agentless backup for enterprises. Without agent installed on each independent virtual machine, not only less resource consumption in the production environment will be taken, but also the budget for extra agent fee and system maintenance can be profoundly reduced.
User-friendly administration. Agentless backup helps centralize backups on different VM. In general, agentless backup only requires one management platform to control the whole situation. Without multiple software for separate agent management, agentless backup is able to work more efficiently than agent-based backup.
Strong Compliance. Considering specific regulatory requirements, many users don’t want to have third party backup agent installed in the production host, and agentless backup solution fully meets this kind of requirement and prevent any kind of data modification during backups.
What are the advantages of Agent-based Backup?
Since backup agent lives at the kernel level in the host, so it can easily detect changed data blocks on the virtual machine. Comparatively, agentless backup usually needs to traverse the whole file system to identify changed data blocks for incremental or differential backup, especially for those don’t support Changed Block Tracking (CBT), the procedure can be more complex.
Agent-based backup is also given better control and visibility of the system host, therefore, the backups can be seen as more granular than agentless backup. For example, the indexing, exclusion or inclusion of specific files are things that only agent-based backup can help to achieve.
How do we choose?
Data is a highly valuable asset in the informatization era, and having a proper backup solution in advance can downgrade the risk of loss to the minimum. The choice of agent-based or agentless backup totally depends on you. After all, the one that fits your business needs most is the best.
In terms of all these facts that have been listed above, we’re here trying to give some suggestions. For large file servers, agent-based backup can be the best approach for in-depth protection. However, we can clearly see that in most application scenarios, it’s agentless backup that shows irreplaceable advantages and convenience to secure a more agile and scalable virtualization environment.
Vinchin offers flexible agentless backup solution for VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer and several other mainstream hypervisors, helping enterprises protect data effortlessly with lower cost. Even for a data center with multiple virtual platforms, centralized backup management can still be done easily through a single web console, making business optimization accessible.
