The advantages of VMWare backups is the capability to provide fast restores. Let's say you use an agent inside the guest OS, you would have to create another VM, join to domain, ip it, install backup agent software and only then start your restore.
VMware aware backups allow for simple backup and restores using vmware snapshots to quiesce the VM and VSS to queisce the guest OS for the most part.
Some provide File Level Restoes such as vRanger, just mount the backup and get the file. You can also use other software but the basic concept it the same. You backup the VM and get fast recovery as well as compression and some provide de-duplication
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by: technicalnotebookPosted on 2009-11-03 at 15:35:35ID: 25735080
From my understanding, using VM aware backup software ensures that you do not get inconsistencies in the data that is being backed up if the VM is live at the time.
For example if you just cloned a VM Disk while the machine was still running, you would likely get a corrupt back up as the disc would be changing throughout the entire backup process.
Where as with VM aware software (depending on how it works) it will either back up from within the Virtual Machine (i.e. to get around that problem) or have some other advanced way of getting a valid backup of a live running VM.
The other option is to use clonezilla for example however you would have to ensure the VM had been shut down completely prior to cloning and would hence require downtime.
Cheers
Stuart