A good backup strategy is the last line of defense against disasters such as hardware failure, environmental damage, accidental deletions, or misconfigurations. In a virtual environment, a backup strategy can turn into a daunting task because of the number of virtual machines that need to be backed up. In a busy production environment, a new virtual machine can come and go anytime. Without a proper backup plan, the entire backup task can become difficult to manage. Gone are the days when we had only a little server hardware to deal with and backing it up was an easy task. In today's virtual environments, a backup solution has to deal with several dozen, or possibly several hundred, virtual machines.
Depending on the business requirement, an administrator may have to back up all the virtual machines regularly, instead of just the files inside VMs. Backing up an entire virtual machine takes up a very large amount of space after a while, depending...