Acronis is trying to make things easier for SMBs to make backups of their VMs, announcing v6.0 of their vmProtect, which is actually a new product.In our story on VM backup technologies earlier this summer, we mentioned several different vendors and their solutions. Despite this collection of products, more than 40 percent of SMBs in the US are NOT backing up their virtual servers, according to the Acronis Disaster Recovery Index.

Follow ReadWriteWeb as we report about the stories we discovered at VMworld, the industry’s largest virtualization conference. Hear directly from our sponsors, VMware and Intel as they share their vision and solutions for virtualization and cloud computing.

And Symantec has found with their survey of more than 650 small business managers, just 15 percent of them always back up their virtualized servers while only another 23 percent either back them up infrequently or not at all. That isn’t good news.

Acronis’ vmProtect v6 can run a virtual machine directly from a backup image, without having to do a full restore, so actual recovery times can take less than a minute. Multiple virtual machines can be backed up and recovered simultaneously through a Web-based interface that allows remote management. You can backup to the network, to the cloud, or to local disk storage. The service is priced at $499 per CPU, and includes unlimited P2V migrations, too. You can see an example of their dashboard here (click to enlarge).

Acronis vmProtect v6 offers both image and file-level recovery options, and data deduplication and compression capabilities are included for free, unlike some of their competitors that charge extra for these features. Backups can be accomplished either using a Windows-based agent or agentless as a separate VM running on an ESX host. vmProtect supports VMware version 4.0 or later hypervisors.

This latest version is an alternative and a subset of what is available from Acronis Backup and Recovery v11 Virtual Edition, which is geared for multiple hypervisors (it handles Hyper-V, Citrix Xen and RedHat too) or for backing up a mixture of physical and virtual servers.