Protecting Virtualized Workloads Across Any Hypervisor

Virtualization has underpinned enterprise infrastructure for years, helping organizations maximize hardware utilization, accelerate workload deployment, and reduce data center complexity. It is now a foundational layer of virtually every enterprise IT stack.

The landscape is shifting. IT leaders are increasingly evaluating their hypervisor options, whether to adopt alternatives for specific workload types, diversify across platforms for greater flexibility, or reduce dependency on any single vendor. Platforms like Nutanix AHV, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization have all seen growing adoption as a result. In many cases, this plays out gradually, with multiple hypervisor vendors running side by side across the same data center for an extended period.

Ransomware has also made VM recovery a board-level concern. The speed and cleanliness of a recovery, including the ability to restore workloads to any available infrastructure rather than just the platform that was attacked, are now core requirements for enterprise data protection.

Whether your organization is maintaining a VMware-centric estate, evaluating alternatives, or managing a multi-hypervisor footprint, DataProtect delivers consistent, enterprise-grade backup, recovery, and cyber resilience from a single platform and policy engine.

Leading hypervisors

VMware vSphere
Microsoft Hyper-V
Nutanix AHV
Oracle Linux VM (OLVM)
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization
OpenStack

Leading hypervisors supported by Cohesity, with a wide range of enterprise-grade protection capabilities.

Top reasons to choose Cohesity for protecting your virtualized environment:

Operational Simplicity

Managing separate backup tools for each hypervisor in a mixed environment adds cost, complexity, and operational risk. Cohesity eliminates that overhead by providing the same platform, policies, and management experience for every hypervisor in your estate, so your data protection remains consistent as your infrastructure evolves.

Agentless, API-native integration: DataProtect connects directly to each hypervisor’s native APIs, with no agents required on VM clients. Onboarding a new hypervisor is a configuration step, not a deployment project
Automated VM discovery and enrollment: Assign SLA policies to VM groups using native hypervisor constructs. New VMs are automatically enrolled in the correct protection policy
No third-party add-ons required: All hypervisor protection is delivered natively through the DataProtect platform. There are no separate plug-ins, connectors, or licenses to maange as your hypervisor footprint grows or changes.
Hardware-agnostic deployment: DataProtect runs as a virtual edition on any supported hypervisor, removing the dependency on dedicated backup appliances. Organizations adopting an alternative hypervisor can protect their workloads without waiting on new hardware procurement

Fast, Confident Recovery

When an outage or cyberattack hits, recovery needs to work at any scale the situation demands. DataProtect delivers both the speed and confidence to restore critical VM workloads, whether it’s a single file or an entire environment.

Instant recovery: Bring VMs back online in seconds while full recovery completes in the background, speeding up recovery time and minimizing business impact
Incremental-forever backup: Capture only what has changed since the last backup. Backup windows stay narrow and more frequent restore points are maintained.
Application-consistent and granular recovery: Restore individual files, folders, or application objects from any VM backup without restoring the full machine. App-consistent recovery ensures that database and application workloads come back clean and complete.
Recovery point selection: Automatically identify and recommend the best recovery point based on anomaly signals and threat scan results, cutting manual triage during ransomware events

Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity

An effective DR strategy depends on knowing your workloads can be recovered quickly, to the right place, and without manual process. DataProtect delivers automated failover, flexible recovery targets, and long-term data retention to ensure business continuity.

DR failover and failback: Automate the orchestration of failover to a DR site and failback to production, with support for multi-VM sequencing and network reconfiguration. Recovery plans can be rehearsed non-disruptively so teams can validate readiness before an event, not during one.
Restore to any alternate location: Recover VMs to a different host, cluster, or datastore. This flexibility is particularly valuable during unplanned outages or when the primary environment is unavailable or compromised.
Archive with data lock: Retain backup copies for long-term compliance and recovery purposes with immutable, locked archive policies. Data lock ensures archived copies can’t be modified or deleted, protecting them from ransomware and insider threats
Multi-tenant support: Support fully isolated multi-tenant environments, allowing different teams, business units, or customers to operate under separate policies, visibility, and access controls within a single platform deployment

Comprehensive protection for the hypervisors you choose:

There are many factors to weigh when evaluating hypervisor options: maturity, enterprise readiness, feature richness, scalability, and ease of management. Your enterprise can standardize on VMware, adopt alternatives, or run several platforms in parallel and get the same enterprise-grade backup, recovery, and cyber resilience across all of them.

Whatever hypervisor your workloads run on, Cohesity has you covered.

Visit https://www.cohesity.com/platform/dataprotect/ to learn more, or contact a Cohesity specialist for an expanded conversation.

Protecting virtualized workloads across any hypervisor