This section provides considerations and requirements for protecting VMware environments.
When you add a VMware virtual host to the appliance, all VMs are discovered and available for host-level protection. Unitrends uses VMware's vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) to communicate with ESX hosts directly or through a vCenter server. You can add ESX hosts, vCenter servers, or both, to the Unitrends appliance to protect your VMs. Some features require a vCenter (for details, see Additional VMware requirements).
The following information summarizes the high-level steps that protect VMware virtual machines. The information includes links to detailed instructions for each procedure.
Step 1: | Review the Best practices and requirements for VMware protection. |
Step 2: | Add the VMware host to your Unitrends appliance. See Adding a virtual host. |
Step 3: | Create backup jobs for your VMs. See Creating backup jobs. |
Review the information in these topics before implementing VMware host-level protection:
You can add the following VMware servers to the Unitrends appliance to protect hosted virtual machines:
Item |
Description |
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vCenter and managed ESX servers |
If ESX servers belong to a vCenter and both are accessible on the network, Unitrends recommends that you add the vCenter and its ESX servers to the appliance. This enables the appliance to contact the vCenter for management operations (including vMotion support) and to directly contact the ESX servers for backup and recovery, potentially improving performance by reducing network traffic around the vCenter server. |
vCenter only |
If the ESX servers are accessible through a vCenter, adding the vCenter to the Unitrends appliance automatically detects all of the associated ESX servers and their hosted virtual machines. This also enables the Unitrends appliance to be compatible with vMotion, a process through which VMs can migrate among the vCenter’s ESX servers. In this case, the appliance detects when VMs move between ESX servers in a cluster and contacts the appropriate server to perform backups. |
ESX server only |
If ESX servers are not accessible through a vCenter, or if only a subset of the VMs hosted on the vCenter’s ESX servers are to be protected, you can add indvidual ESX servers. In this case, the appliance contacts the ESX servers directly for backup and recovery. |
Follow these best practices to protect your VMware virtual machines:
• | Adhere to VMware's best practices. |
• | If you are adding an ESX or vCenter server to multiple Unitrends appliances, be sure to back up each VM on only one appliance. Backing up the same VM on multiple appliances causes problems with the Change Block Tracking (CBT) used for incremental and differential backups. |
• | If you add a vCenter, Unitrends recommends also adding the individual ESX hosts managed by the vCenter. |
• | Full, differential, and incremental backups are supported for VMs configured with hardware version 7 or higher. CBT must be enabled for differentials and incrementals. See General VMware requirements for details. |
• | In some cases, you may want or need to protect VMs by using asset-level backups. For recommendations, see Protecting VMware virtual machines at the asset level. |
• | Do not run host-level backups for VMs that you are protecting at the asset level. Doing so can compromise log truncation changes for applications and lead to other undesirable results. |
• | To protect hosted Exchange or SQL simple recovery model applications, use the application-aware feature for host-level backups. See Application-aware protection for details. |
• | If recovery time objectives are very important, set up VMware instant recovery to quickly spin up a failed VM from host-level backups. |
• | For virtual disks hosted on a NAS datastore, running a full backup captures the complete disk (entire virtual disk size). |
• | Backup failures can occur after a VM’s disks are converted from VHD to VMDK using a third-party tool. For details and solutions for resolving this issue, see KB 1167. |
• | Host-level protection is not supported for the following (use asset-level backups instead): |
– | VMs in a cluster configuration with a fault tolerant disk. |
– | VMs with dynamic MAC addresses. |
– | Independent and pass-though disks. These disks are automatically excluded from host-level backups. |
– | Physical Raw Disk Mapping (RDM) disks. These disks are automatically excluded from host-level backups. (Virtual-mode raw device mapped disks are supported with host-level protection.) |
– | Sparse disks. |
– | VMs hosted on Free ESXi versions. |
The following requirements must be met for host-level protection of VMware virtual machines.
Item |
Description |
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ESX host |
Must be a licensed version listed in the Unitrends Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix. Note: Additional requirements and limitations apply to ESXi 6. See Additional VMware requirements for details. |
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vCenter |
Must be a licensed version listed in the Unitrends Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix. Note: Additional requirements and limitations apply to vCenter 6. See Additional VMware requirements for details. |
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vCenter or ESX account privileges |
An account with full administrative privileges is required. The user or group must have the role administrator. You supply these credentials when adding the vCenter or ESX server to the backup appliance. |
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Virtual machine configuration |
Verify the following VM configuration settings:
Note: On Vsphere 5.5. VMware introduced new SATA Virtual Hardware Controllers with vSphere 5.5 and VM Hardware Version 10. See KB 1500 for details on selecting the correct controller when creating new VMs in version 5.5. |
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Change Block Tracking (CBT) |
CBT is required to run incremental and differential backups. Running a full backup enables CBT on the VM disks as long as:
Note: On hardware version 4. Only full backups are supported for VMs configured with hardware version 4. |
These additional requirements may apply to your environment.
Item |
Description |
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vSphere 6 |
To protect hosted VMs in vCenter 6 or ESXi 6 environments, these additional requirements and limitations apply:
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VMware clusters |
To protect VMware clustered environments, you must add the vCenter to your Unitrends appliance. |
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VMware templates |
To protect VMware templates, you must add the vCenter to your Unitrends appliance. |
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Virtual-mode raw device mapped disks |
Raw device mapping (RDM) is a feature of ESX that allows a virtual disk in a VM to be created on a remote iSCSI LUN rather than on a datastore local to the ESX server. VMs with virtual-mode raw device mapped disks are supported with the following limitations:
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SAN-direct backup for Recovery-Series appliances |
For ESX hosts whose datastores are located on an external SAN, configure SAN-direct backups. This configuration enables the job to move data directly from the external SAN to the backup appliance during the backup. This direct connection increases backup performance and decreases network bandwidth utilization, affording greater scheduling flexibility as the production network is not used during the backup. See the Unitrends Knowledge Base for requirements and setup procedures. |
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HotAdd backup for UEB on VMware appliances |
For ESX hosts whose datastores are located on an external SAN, configure backups to use the HotAdd transport mode. This configuration enables the job to move data directly from the external SAN to the appliance during the backup. This direct connection increases backup performance and decreases network bandwidth utilization, affording greater scheduling flexibility as the production network is not used during the backup. See the Unitrends Knowledge Base for requirements and setup procedures. |
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Virtualized Active Directory servers |
To ensure database consistency, you must set up the virtualized Active Directory (AD) server in accordance with Microsoft best practices. If all Microsoft considerations are not addressed, backup and restore of the virtual machine may yield undesired results. If you prefer not to research these best practices, install the agent on the VM and protect it as you would a physical server (leveraging Microsoft’s VSS writers). |
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Distributed File System environments |
Distributed File System (DFS) Namespaces and DFS Replication offer high-available access to geographically dispersed files. Because of the replication and syncing operations in DFS environments, you must set up the virtual machine in accordance with Microsoft best practices to ensure database consistency. If all Microsoft considerations are not addressed, backup and restore of the virtual machine may yield undesired results. If you prefer not to research these best practices, install the agent on the VM and protect it as you would a physical server (leveraging Microsoft’s VSS writers). |