CA ARCserve Backup r16

CA’s ARCserve Backup r16 aims to amalgamate disk, tape and cloud backup into a single product. Dave Mitchell puts it through its paces in the lab to see if it has every data protection angle covered.

IT Pro Verdict

As long term users of ARCserve, we’ve always found it provides a very good range of data protection tools for the price and is particularly easy to use. This latest version adds essential support for cloud storage, backup features for virtualised environments are good and value is increased considerably by the integral data deduplication.

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ARCserve protects your virtual servers

ARCserve r16 now supports host-level backup for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. We tested this with Microsoft's Hyper-V and used a Dell PowerEdge R515 server running Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Hyper-V role.

The ARCserve Windows agent must be installed on the Hyper-V host and one agent license includes any number of guest VMs on that system. ARCserve supports snapshot-based backups using the Hyper-V VSS Writer which allows entire VMs to be backed up and restored.

Backing up VMs at this level is simple. During the job creation you browse the server object and select any of its VMs as sources. Running VMs are backed up with child partition snapshots whilst those powered down use the latest saved state.

For file level restoration you must load the ARCserve agent within each VM as well. After populating the ARCserve backup database using the Hyper-V host agent, running VMs with the agent installed also appear in a separate group in the source view where you can select their virtual volumes.

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We found the backup process no different to securing physical servers. For restore operations we could select individual files and folders in the VM and return them to their original location or another destination.

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Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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