The market offers several valid solutions you can choose from, and backup product selection must consider different elements, such as infrastructure complexity, supported platforms, backup types, licensing, budget, and so forth.

Based on what you need to backup, the chosen software solution must provide specific features to meet the requirements. For example, to backup Microsoft SQL Servers, application-aware backups with log truncate features must be supported to ensure database consistency. If you are still performing backups on tapes, make sure the product supports tapes.

Since the available backup solutions provide different options, capabilities, and pricing (a complete list of the backup interoperability matrix for the VMware vSphere environment is available at http://www.vbrain.info/backup-interoperability-matrix-vsphere/), some popular backup products specific to virtual environments will now be briefly illustrated to better understand what the market is offering. The listed vendors and product ordering don't follow any classification or preference.