Set up Synology Active Backup for Business in a vSphere Homelab

When managing a VMware vSphere homelab, having a reliable backup solution is crucial. Whether you’re testing new software, simulating a production environment, or simply learning, data loss can be a significant setback. Synology Active Backup for Business is a cost-effective, feature-rich solution that integrates seamlessly with VMware vSphere environments. I normally use Veeam Backup and replication in my homelab but during my vacation I needed something simpler, that would only backup my most essentials services like AD, DNS etc. In this post, I’ll walk you through setting up Synology Active Backup in my VMware homelab.

What is Synology Active Backup for Business?

Synology Active Backup for Business is a free, unified backup solution provided by Synology for its NAS devices. It is designed to protect a wide range of IT environments, including virtual machines (VMs) on VMware and Hyper-V, physical servers, and even Windows workstations. The software’s flexibility makes it ideal for both small businesses and home users who want to ensure their data is safe and easily recoverable.

Key Features of Synology Active Backup for Business:

• Agentless Backup: No need to install backup agents on each VM. The software uses VMware APIs to handle backups directly from the hypervisor, which simplifies management and reduces overhead.
• Centralized Management: Manage backups from a single console. This is particularly useful in a homelab environment where you might be running multiple VMs.
• Granular Recovery Options: Allows for file-level or full VM recovery, offering flexibility depending on the type of data loss.
• Deduplication and Compression: Reduces the storage footprint and network load during backups, which is beneficial in a homelab setup where resources may be limited.
• Incremental Backup: Supports incremental backups that only back up changes since the last backup, which saves time and storage.

Overview of Supported Platforms

Active Backup for Business supports a variety of platforms, including:

• VMware vSphere (vCenter Server and ESXi hosts version 5.0-8.0 including free ESXi)
• Microsoft Hyper-V (2016 and 2019 incl. Hyper-V failover clusters)
• Windows Workstations and Servers
• File Servers (CIFS/SMB)

For a more comprehensive list of supported platforms you can check out the Requirements and Limitation site from the Active Backup for Business documentation.

Install Synology Active Backup for Business

Synology Active Backup for Business is free on every Synology NAS but you would need an Synology account to activate the software package.

In Synology Package Center locate the Active Backup for Business application

Click install to install the application package. After the installation you will have 2 new applications.

• Active Backup for Business – Used as the primary configuration application
• Active Backup for Business Portal – Used for restores and self service if the users have permissions.

When you start the application for the first time, you need to activate it in the Synology account.

Click Activate and login with your Synology credentials. After a successful login you need to confirm the Privacy statement.

After you click next, the application activates and is ready to go.

Adding an ESXi host or vCenter

After installing Synology Active Backup for Business, we can start configuring our first backup task. Open the application and go to Virtual Machine.

You can see that I have already configured some of my ESXi hosts. We will now add a new host called ESX01. For this click on Manage Hypervisor.

Click Add to add a new host.

In the server address field enter the IP or FQDN of your host, keep the web service at 443, use your root user and password, and click next.

You will get a certificate warning if you use self-signed certificates like me. Click Yes to continue.

After a couple of seconds you should see a successful result.

After clicking Done you will be back at the overview screen. There you can see the newly added host. If you click the chevron icon, you can also see all the virtual machines registered on this host along with their space usage.

Not only can you add ESXi hosts to Active Backup for Business but also vCenter server. The procedure is the same as for host, but you will see different things in the overview.

When you add a vCenter, you will see the vCenterName followed by the ESXi server connected to it. In our case there is also a red row with the warning “Unknown VM”. This warning appears because this host is currently powered down.

Configure a vSphere Virtual Machine backup task

For creating your first backup task you need to click on “Create Task”. In the following windows you can define a task name and select all VMs you want to backup. ATTENTION: Unfortunately you can only view either “Hosts and clusters” or “VMs and folders”. There is no view for Tags.

I selected 2 of my VMs to back up. In the next window, you can select the backup destination. Only shares created on Btrfs volumes will be available as backup targets.

After clicking next you see all settings for the backup destination. You set these settings beforehand when you created the share.

In the next section there are a lot of configurations you can set. For a complete overview what all these settings are doing please visit the Synology documentation. The most important setting for backing up vSphere VMs is to use Change Block Tracking (CBT). By default, new VMs do not have CBT enabled, so selecting ‘Enable Change Block Tracking’ will automatically enable it on the chosen VMs..

After you click Next it will process all selected VMs. If everything is fine it will have a green check mark.

In the next step you can choose your schedule. Either choose “Manual Backup” or “Scheduled Backup”. For the demo purposes we have chosen “Manual Backup”.

Retention Policies are the next step. If they are not configured then Active Backup for Business will keep every backup. In our case we don’t want to do that so we enabled retention policy and set it to “Keep latest 10 versions”.

If you like to have a more advanced approach like Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) you can do that under Advanced retention policy. There you can configure whatever your requirements are.

In the last step you configure the restoration privilege, so which user can restore data from this backup job.

After you checked all configuration parameters on the summary page you can start your first backup.

Storage Status and Usage

After the first backup job was completed we can see under Overview – Storage Status what kind of devices we have backed up as well the storage usage of the backup. I had not only one backup job running but 2.

As you can see the total backup size was around 560 GB and after deduplication and compression the effective storage usage is only around 172GB. This is a reduction around 3.2x which is really impressive for a small NAS box and a free backup tool.

Conclusion

Implementing Synology Active Backup for Business in a VMware vSphere homelab provides a cost-effective, flexible, and powerful solution for protecting your virtual machines and critical data. By understanding how to set up and configure Synology Active Backup, run and automate backups and restore VMs, you can ensure a robust backup strategy that suits your unique homelab environment.