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Rollout: Vizioncore vRanger Professional 3.2: Page 3 of 5

The vRanger Pro software can back up to NTFS, Linux, and VMware's VMFS. Backing up to a VMFS LUN, shared between your ESX cluster hosts, has a distinct advantage in that the virtual machine backups will exist on the file system that can serve them up, giving you the option of backing up to an offsite ESX Cluster Datacenter. You could create a "new" virtual machine and point to the newly created backup image, and start the machine up.

This isn't optimal, though, if you want to scrape your backups to an enterprise storage management system. The other two options, Linux and NTFS, are better choice if you intend to move backups off the proxy to tape or disk.

vRanger's predominate interface characteristic is a three-tabbed stepwise navigation, guiding users through backup selection, backup destination, and backup options—in that order. While intuitive, it does the force you into a prescribed workflow to build a backup job. This may not be ideal if you have a cluster of several hundred virtual machines; we'd prefer to see the operation in reverse: Establish settings, set the permanent backup destination, and then select the machines. We'd also like the ability to save and edit settings in the app.

Our first inclination was to right-click on a VM to see the available functions, but vRanger lacks a "right-click" menu, a typical part of most contemporary applications. One compelling feature is the CLI compilation at the bottom of the main application window. As you build your backup set, the CLI assembles syntax, which can be copied when complete. In observing the CLI construction, you'll see how your backup commands and schedules are compiled; learn this syntax and you could hammer out backup commands at the CLI and bypass the GUI altogether.

vRanger v3.2 runs jobs via the Windows Task Scheduler, a functional but simplistic methodology. Once you schedule and name your backup job, it populates the newly created job with the CLI syntax and the usual times and credentials you see in the Task Scheduler interface.