Like other backup software products, VMware and Avamar at the API level, allowing users to purchase Avamar software and manage it through VMware's vStorage API.

Now that VDP is integrated with vCenter, users can set up backup policies quickly and manage VDP directly from the vSphere Web Client. All VM data associated with the VDP virtual appliance is also automatically deduplicated at the block level.

VDP is suited for backing up a maximum of 100 VMs and can protect a storage pool of up to 2TB of deduplicated data, according to Steve Flynn, EMC director of product marketing for Avamar.

Another advantage of embedding the Avamar code directly into the vSphere software is that is can now perform change-block tracking, or the ability to backup only those blocks of data on VMs that have changed between backups. That reduces bandwidth requirements for backups.

Conversely, the change-block tracking allows VDP to restore only the data that has been changed since the last backup, which affords faster recovery time compared to restoring an entire VM.