Arkeia Software, a provider of backup and recovery software and appliances, has launched Arkeia Backup Agent for backup and recovery of Vmware and Hyper-V virtual environments and applications, including Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL Server, Novell’s iFolder, GroupWise, and eDirectory.

According to Arkeia, the new Arkeia Backup Agent supports vStorage programming interfaces (APIs) to enable backups of VMware virtual machines. It provides support for VMware vSphere 4 platforms, including vCenter, ESX, and ESXi; vStorage Backup Agent permits backups to disk, to tape, and to disk and then to tape (D2D2T); and backup data sets can be replicated locally, and over a WAN.

The company said that in Arkeia’s roll-out vStorage Backup Agent is the final of three installments of Arkeia Network Backup v8.2 which supports Arkeia’s Backup Agent for Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Arkeia backup offerings for Xen and KVM.

In addition, block-grain incremental image-level backups using VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) for reduced storage needs and faster backups due to reduced network traffic; vCenter integration for management of backup and recovery operations for environments with multiple physical hosts; and multiple transport methods that allows users to perform LAN-free backups over the SAN

Arkeia’s Raw Device Mapping (RDM) support for backups of remote block storage devices, including incremental backups using CBT when in virtual compatibility mode; flexible restores including hypervisor redirection, as well as options to choose datacenter/folder, cluster/host, resource pool, or datastore destinations to simplify the restore process.

Arkeia will bundle the vStorage Backup Agent in the Arkeia Virtual Appliance for VMware Essentials, the company said.