oVirt is powerful open-source virtualization management platform. It is often chosen by company as a low-cost virtualization solution. Compared with the commercial virtualization solution like VMware and Hyper-V, there are less features but it still provide robust flexibility and scalability so it becomes a popular virtualization solution for small businesses.

In 2023, VMware license cost is significantly increased by Broadcom so many companies have to switch from VMware to other virtualization platforms, among which oVirt is a popular one. This also indicates that oVirt is a good alternative to VMware.

VM backup is very important. Whether you are new to oVirt or an experienced user, you can find the proper solution to backup your oVirt VM or replace your current solution a better one.

1.Vinchin Backup & Recovery

Vinchin Backup& Recovery is a versatile virtualization backup solution for enterprises. It offers agentless backup for oVirt environment so it facilitates the management of large environments. Its user-friendly web console makes it easy for you to get started.

Except for the fundamental oVirt backup and recovery feature, it is also provides useful backup strategies and powerful disaster recovery features.

It can automate oVirt VM backup jobs with schedule settings, reducing backup data size with deduplication and compression, fastening backup speed with incremental backup, CBT, and LAN-free transmission, managing backup storage with backup data retention policies, etc.

As an enterprise-level data protection solution, it facilitates disaster recovery solution with offsite backup, helping copying data to a secondary data center, instant restore, recovering VM in 15 seconds, backup verification, verifying the usability of VM backup, directly backing up oVirt VM to public cloud like AWS and Azure or archiving VM backup data there. For the critical production VMs, you can install CDP agents on them to continuous backup them.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery can also help easily migrate VM from other virtualization platforms to oVirt so if you are troubled with VMware license, try it to seamlessly switch to oVirt.

2.Veeam Backup for OLVM and RHV

Veeam Backup for OLVM and RHV is the solution in Veeam Backup & Replication. As the leading data protection solution provider, Veeam is also a good choice for oVirt Backup.

Veeam provides a Windows desktop application and you can use it to perform agentless backups for oVirt VMs. You need to first install the oVirt KVM Plug-in on Veeam Backup & Replication and then connect to the oVirt KVM Manager to perform the backups. Veeam supports various backup strategies, such as full backups and incremental backups. In fact, Veeam's default setting is essentially a forever incremental backup, where a full backup is created at the start of the backup chain, and then only incremental backups are performed afterward. If you prefer to have a full backup in the middle of the backup chain for added security, Veeam also offers a synthetic full backup feature. This allows you to continue running only incremental backups while automatically creating a full backup at specific points in time.

To ensure the availability of backup data, you can enable the health check feature when creating a backup task. This function automatically checks the consistency of the backup data. If there is any inconsistency, it will be addressed during the next backup task to ensure the most recent backup data is usable. Additionally, you can manually run SureBackup tasks to verify the availability of the backup data. It also supports backup task cloning, allowing you to quickly create backup tasks.

3.BDR Suite

Vembu is also one of the vendors in the market that provides professional support for oVirt virtual machine backups. Their solution, called the BDR Suite, offers a web console to manage the backup system. As an enterprise-level virtual machine backup solution, it naturally provides agentless backup functionality to quickly deploy the backup system. Additionally, it supports configuring various backup strategies, including scheduled backups, AES-256 encryption, retention policies, and more. It also supports backing up oVirt virtual machine data to the cloud, such as S3, Azure, and others.

In terms of ransomware protection, the BDR Suite ensures that backup data is not tampered with through technologies like immutable storage and air-gapped backups. In other disaster recovery aspects, it offers many features, such as Instant Boot VM, automatic failover, data replication, continuous data protection, granular restore, and more.

4.Acronis Cyber Protect

Acronis is a well-established data protection vendor, and their Acronis Cyber Protect offers a web console that supports backing up oVirt virtual machines, but it uses an agent-based backup approach. This means you need to install an agent on each guest machine in order to connect the oVirt VMs to the backup system. While this process is more complex compared to agentless backups, Acronis still provides powerful features.

Acronis Cyber Protect supports hot backups for oVirt virtual machines, and allows you to configure full backups, incremental backups, retention policies, data encryption, etc. You can also filter disks or volumes during backup. After backing up the virtual machine, if you need to restore it quickly, you can use the instant restore feature to run the virtual machine directly from the backup.

Acronis also supports converting physical machines into virtual machines. You simply need to back up the physical machine using Acronis Cyber Protect, then convert the backup data into a format supported by virtual machines, and create the VM on the target platform. Currently, it supports conversion to VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation, and Microsoft Hyper-V. You can also convert the backup data of a physical machine into a VHDX file for more flexible use.

5.Commvault Virtual Server Agent for oVirt

Commvault is also a well-established data protection vendor. Their solution for oVirt is the Virtual Server Agent for oVirt. As you can see, it is also an agent-based backup, so you may need to spend some time configuring the backup system, especially if you have a large number of virtual machines.

Virtual Server Agent for oVirt supports a wide range of features, including Full Backup, Incremental Backup, Synthetic Full Backup, Retention Rules, Job Retry, On-Demand Data Protection Operation, Restore by Jobs, Global Alerts, and more.