Expanded capabilities for Xen, Proxmox and Self-Service Backup in Bacula 10

Bacula Enterprise 10 brings expanded capabilities for Xen, Proxmox and Self-Service Backup. It delivers a range of unique features for IT departments, data centers, MSPs and hosting providers to:

Add Xen and Proxmox to their automated backup and recovery virtual environments
Benefit from improved MSSQL backup and recovery integration, to add to the database integration portfolio of MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SAP HANA and many others
Expand on their services to their end-users
Delegate backup and recovery tasks more easily

Do you need a wider range of features that bring more value?

Today’s IT environments can get complicated, and their managers are required to constantly develop, transform and innovate in order to remain competitive and attractive to customers. Bacula Enterprise 10 offers a number of unique and convenient tools to help provide as many options as possible , a including massive range of virtual machine and database compatibility, advanced deduplication and compression tools, state of the art security built into every layer, snapshot management and a range of both GUI and text interfaces. All of this – and much, much more, is available with Bacula’s incredibly flexibly licensing, and without charging by data volume.

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Here are just some of Version 10’s new features:

Xen Backup and Recovery: Ease and Speed

Bacula Systems’ technology for backing up and recovering data from Xen servers brings never-seen-before speed and convenience to Xen users, all designed to make your life easier and with no intermediate steps required. It is part of Bacula’s VM Performance Suite that also has advanced technologies for backing up VMware, Hyper V, KVM and Proxmox.

Bacula Enterprises’ native integration with Xen provides virtual machine bare metal recovery, while its ability to back up data at the guest level simplifies data protection of critical applications. Backup can be performed for a guest VM in any power state (running or halted).

Bacula uses the Xen Server API to access and backup virtual machines. It brings a broad range of features, capabilities and automation to the Xen environment:

Snapshot-based online backup of any guest VM
VSS-based guest snapshots for quiescing VSS-based applications
Full image-level backup
Ability to restore complete virtual machine image
Ability to restore VM archive (.xva) to alternate directory
Full restore job logs

It also displays useful information about available XenServer resources, which could simplify your backup configuration and restore operations, such as:
List of guest VM name-labels
List of guest VM UUIDs
List of XenServer Storage Repositories

Proxmox Backup and Recovery: Ease and Speed

Bacula Enterprise’s unique compatibility with diverse types of virtual environments also includes Proxmox. Bacula enables true enterprise-grade backup and recovery of the Proxmox open-source server virtualization environment. It makes Proxmox backup and restore operations as fast and simple as possible, and brings all the advantages of Bacula’s especially broad feature set to benefit the user with increased operational efficiency and reduced costs.

Proxmox VE is a powerful and lightweight open source server virtualization software, optimized for performance and usability. Offering maximum flexibility and using the Proxmox API, Bacula is fully integrated and can back up and recover data from Proxmox, including its two virtualization technologies – Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and container-based virtualization with Linux Containers (LXC) – and / or QEMU virtual machines.

Here are some of its features:

Snapshot-based online backup of any VM including QEMU and LXC Guests
Full image-level backup
Restore complete virtual machine image to original or alternate Proxmox hypervisor

Restore QEMU VM archive (.vma) to alternate directory
Restore LXC VM archive (.tar) and configuration to alternate directory

BCloud Service

BCloud Service is a simple user-oriented web front-end for backup and recovery tasks. As a multi-tenant backup solution, it is designed to safely delegate straightforward and restricted backup administrator tasks to an end user that may not be required to have high level permissions or have access to the whole backup system. IT Departments and MSPs can use BCloud Service to offer self-service backup, by enabling their own customers to easily create and manage their own backup jobs, restore files, do LDAP authentication and much more. It has specific functionalities designed for Hosting and Cloud companies, and comprehensive information specifically about BCloud Service can be found in this whitepaper.

BCloud Service utilizes Bacula’s REST-API to allow third person users (for example, junior administrators, or customers of MSPs) to utilize only a given portion of Bacula’s underlying backup infrastructure. It is designed to easily translate to different panels. Being user-oriented, it is simplified to be fast and efficient to use. Using Bacula, hosting companies and Backup as a Service providers can exploit specialized tools that limit the size and scope of a customer’s self-service backup and recovery.

Some of BCloud Service’s features are:

Display of amount of data used / available
Schedule-setting and scheduled intervals
Monitoring of backup and restore jobs, including Job Name, Level, Start Time, Duration, Job Files, Job Bytes, Average Speed, Errors and Status
Drag and drop file restore
Client Protection Status (Client Host Status Information)
Backup and restore history, grouped by client

Job (s) status, grouped by client
Cancel running jobs
Job logs
System administrator can customize BCloud Service using php hook scripts
System administrator can limit the number of Clients, Jobs, Schedules and Pool size per user
Users are authenticated via LDA and can add and schedule their own backup jobs; register their own clients; start, monitor or abort backup/restore jobs and much more

Global Endpoint Deduplication Quiesce Command

Bacula Systems’ Global Endpoint Deduplication™ is built into Bacula Enterprise and is an enterprise endpoint backup technology that gives MSPs the choice to apply it either to the client side (file daemon) thereby saving network and storage resources, or at the storage level depending on how the user wants to manage the data; This gives the benefits of both global and endpoint deduplication.

IT is also possible to combine this ‘dedupe’ at the client side with Bacula Enterprise’s comm line compression feature to allow even better management and lower bandwidth consumption. It is now possible to quiesce the Global Endpoint Deduplication Engine to safely copy the data without shutting down the Storage Daemon. The commands quiesce and unquiesce enable a user to freeze and un-freeze the Global Endpoint Deduplication Engine on demand.

New Prune Command Option

The bconsole “prune” command can now run the pruning algorithm on all volumes from a Pool or on all Pools.

MSSQL Plugin

Bacula Enterprise 10 offers advanced, convenient backup and recovery for an especially large range of different database tapes – for example, MYSQL, Oracle, SAP HANA, PostgreSQL, MSSQL and more. It can precisely backup very large amounts of specific Windows-based data in your SQL Server at a fraction of competitors’ costs – and achieve Point In Time SQL Server restore. A new checksum command and restore option has been added to ask the SQL Server to verify the checksum of the data during the backup or the restore.