Agent-based backups
The backup driver resides at the operating system kernel level.
Agent-based backup offers a range of advantages:
1. Application awareness — Built for specific applications, agents enable very granular recovery.
2. Security — Once installed, the agent has access to the operating system and application. There’s no need to
store privileged username/password information on a potentially insecure backup server.
3. Breadth — Agents can protect both physical and virtual machines. Great for legacy workloads.
4. Reliability — With no single point of failure, an agent continues to run even if a backup management console
goes offline.
5. Local — Agents can boost backup performance by pre-processing and compressing data locally.
Agentless backups
Agentless backups rely on an external system to manage and perform the backup operations for each source
system. In theory, all processing, storage, replication, and other functions happen on, or are managed by, the host
or the central backup controller.
1. Leading-edge capability — Agentless backup is built from the ground up for virtual environment like VMware
2. Simplicity — Agentless backup doesn’t require installing agents across dozens or hundreds of virtual machines. It also
doesn’t require rebooting each host after agent installation.
3. Affordability — There’s no agent fee for each virtual machine.
4. Performance — Though the host still performs the processing, it incurs less CPU, memory, and I/O impact.
