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Those that know me know that I am a very proud Australian of Maltese decent…so when I was emailed a while back to see if I would review the beta for Altaro’s new version of their Hyper-V Backup solution I was drawn by the surnames of the Altaro founders. After a quick Google I discovered that this Backup Software company was founded and based out of Malta which instantly sparked my interest…I’ve known for a while that Malta has a very strong tech industry and the Island has become known for producing strong programmers and developers.

That aside, I was also interested in their 6.0 product which introduces VMware support to extend what is now a well rounded backup alternative for the small to mid market at a very competitive price point. There are a lot of Backup software products out there in the market but there are not a lot that keep things simple…and from my time trying out Altaro in the lab it seems that they have hit that mark while still offering enough of a feature set to keep more advanced user expectations in check.

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As mentioned, version 6 introduces VMware support and now allows backup and recovery of both Hyper-V and ESXi VMs to a local of offsite location. It provides a central Management Console for all backups and doesn’t rely on an external database for it’s configuration. One thing I would like to see added to the product is the ability to choose an offsite repository thats not another Altaro Backup Server…ie direct to S3 or a Swift Compatible endpoint, though this can be achieved by pointing the backup target at a iSCSI/NFS mount that could be an AWS Gateway Appliance or a Twinstrata Appliance.

Other features include:

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Versions of VMware supported:

  • VMware vCenter 5.0, 5.1, 5.5 and 6.0
  • VMware ESXi 5.0, 5.1, 5.5 and 6.0

Versions of Hyper-V supported:

  • Windows 2008/2012 R2
  • Windows Hyper-V Server 2008/2012 R2

Below is a ten minute video that goes through the simple next next setup and shows you how easy it is to connect to a vCenter and start backing up VMs.

Altaro offers a couple of versions at different price points and also has a free edition that backs up 2 VMs with a four week retention.

  •     Standard Edition : Most functionality with protection of up to five VMs (~$370USD)
  •     Unlimited Edition : All functionality for an unlimited number of VMs and supports clusters (~$560USD)
  •     Free Edition: Protects up to two VMs with four weeks retention

For small to medium setups with 2-5 Hosts its an attractive alternative to the existing smaller players in the market…though you would still be looking at the larger vendors for bigger virutalized footprints it’s great to see news guys coming into the market. Well done to David, Conrad and rest of the Altaro Team out of Malta…great to see tech of this standard coming out of my Island home!

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