- Acronis Backup Cloud for VMware and Acronis Backup Cloud for Hyper-V is designed and optimized specially for agentless backup of virtual machines.
- These editions allow you to perform backups of virtual machines without the need to install an agent on each guest system - agents only need to be installed on hosts.
- Agentless backup is install on host machine and able to protected selected or all vm inside the host.
To back up machines in an ESXi Free environment, regular Acronis Agent for Windows/Agent for Linux (as opposed to Acronis Agent for ESX/ESXi) should be installed inside the virtual machines. Agentless backup is not supported.
The reason is that the specific VMware API through which Acronis Agent for ESX/ESXi (virtual appliance) works is the Remote Command Line (RCLI) appliance. RCLI is available in read-only access in the free VMware ESXi. Due to this, Acronis Agent for ESX/ESXi cannot function in the free VMware ESXi.
- In order to protect a real server, Azure VM or Amazon VM or you wish to install agent on a virtual machine guest OS level, please use normal agent installer for the corresponding OS instead of agentless backup agent.