PHD Virtual Review

I’d been hearing a lot of buzz about PHD Virtual after seeing them at VMworld and the Chicago VMUG Conference and thought that I’d try them out.  I was quite pleased with their product and recommend that you check them out if you’re looking for virtual backup solutions.  I know that the big player in the market seems to be Veeam so if you’d like a comparison of features, check out this information from ITComparison.com to get a non-biased opinion.

PHD was very easy to install.  A standard installer executable for the machine you’ll be using to manage the backups, and then you need to import an OVF file.  When you launch your PHD client for the first time, you’ll need to enter credentials for your vCenter server and a location for your backups to be stored.  This can be a virtual disk attached to your virtual appliances, an NFS share, or a CIFS share.

Once your initial setup is done, you can start creating backups.  Go to Jobs and click backup, which will take you through a wizard that will setup your backups.

Choose your VM(s)

Choose your appliance.  (yes this is so that you can load balance between appliances)

Choose either a Full backup, or incremental.

Set your schedule

Add additional options such as adding retention policies.

Quiesce vss aware applications andor truncate logs.  This is a very nice feature if you need to backup a database application!

Review your summary, and complete.

You can see your backups running and what kind of dedupe ratio you’re getting.

There are some other great features of this product such as replication, instant VM recovery which mounts the VM directly from backup storage, file recovery etc.

What I found useful is the ability to migrate your settings from one appliance to another, by either using the migration wizard, or through a standard exportimport process.

It’s a nice product and worth a look, if you’re shopping for backup software.