Virtualization spreading across data centers, requiring an agent on every physical and virtual machine in the network, is becoming less cost-effective, more difficult to manage, and less capable of providing scalability and flexibility.
If an agent is installed on every virtual machine, it can ensure temporary suspension of writes during backup.
Agentless backup has its advantages as well as disadvantages, and sometimes backup using agents may prove to be faster and produce more consistent backups.
Agentless backup itself requires only one agent on the given host for backup across the entire network.
A centralized management design with a single agent offers many benefits for dynamic virtualized networks with a large and changing number of virtual machines:
- Lower costs: mainly related to lower processor and bandwidth consumption, eliminating the need to obtain additional licenses or permissions from the software vendor – facilitating scalability and simplifying budget planning
- Simplified management: agentless systems are usually implemented using a centralized management approach. The centralized approach provides a network view that enables administrators to control every virtual machine from a single point
- Greater flexibility: agentless backup architectures support almost all operating systems, databases, and email formats used today