This topic is intended to help you decide between different specific installation locations for your instance of NAKIVO Backup & Replication.
Compared to physical installation, installing the NAKIVO Backup & Replication solution on a virtual machine has the following advantages:
- High availability, based on the hypervisor built-in high-availability components. VMware, Hyper-V, or Nutanix AHV high availability clusters may be used for the effective clustering of your virtualized environment.
- Flexibility in resizing and re-scaling your environment.
On the other hand, when installing the application on a physical machine, you gain the following:
- Independence from the virtual platform.
- Better performance of backup and replication jobs.
The product can be installed on the following hypervisors:
- Bare-metal hypervisor, which is the hosting operating system.
- Embedded hypervisor, which is a separate software program.
Comparison of installation types:
| Physical | Virtual | NAS | Cloud | |
| Vertical scalability | Low | High | Low | High |
| Solution performance | High | Medium | Low | Low |
Installing NAKIVO Backup & Replication on a NAS makes sense if you plan to deploy your backup repository there. In this case, all solution components become easily accessible and free from third-party intrusion, ensuring the utmost in security. This will also help you to avoid any subscription fees as compared to cloud installation. On the other hand, there is an issue with the initial cost for a NAS-based installation.
Cloud installation is more straightforward and allows you to access the solution from any place where there is Internet connection. In addition, it provides you with better security and flexibility.