A good backup strategy is the last line of defense against disasters, such as hardware failure, environmental damages, accidental deletions, and misconfigurations. In a virtual environment, a backup strategy turns into a daunting task because of the number of machines needed to be backed up. In a busy production environment, virtual machines may be created and discarded whenever needed or not needed. Without a proper backup plan, the entire backup task can go out of control. Gone are those days when we only had few server hardware to deal with and backing them up was an easy task. Today's backup solutions have to deal with several dozens or possibly several hundred virtual machines.

Depending on the requirement, an administrator may have to backup all the virtual machines regularly instead of just the files inside them. Backing up an entire virtual machine takes up a very large amount of space after a while depending on how many previous backups we have. A granular...