Backing up VMware data
Use a backup job to back up VMware resources such as virtual machines (VMs), datastores, folders, vApps, and datacenters with snapshots.
Before you begin
- Register the providers that you want to back up. For more instructions, see Adding a vCenter Server instance.
- Configure SLA policies. For more instructions, see Create backup policies.
- Before an IBM Spectrum Protect Plus user can implement backup and restore operations, roles and resource groups must be assigned to the user. Grant users access to resources and backup and restore operations through the Accounts pane. For more information, see Managing user access.
- If a VM is associated with multiple SLA policies, ensure that the policies are not scheduled to run concurrently. Either schedule the SLA policies to run with a significant amount of time between them, or combine them into a single SLA policy.
- If your vCenter is a VM, to help maximize data protection, have the vCenter on a dedicated datastore and backed up in a separate backup job.
- Ensure the latest version of VMware Tools is installed on VMware VMs.
About this task
- When backing up VMware VMs, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus downloads .vmx, .vmxf, and .nvram files if necessary, and then it transfers those files to the vSnap server as needed. For this to work successfully, the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus appliance must be able to resolve and access all protected ESXi hosts. When the appliance communicates with an ESXi host, the correct IP address must be returned.
- If a VM is protected by an SLA policy, the backups of the VM will be retained based on the retention parameters of the SLA policy, even if the VM is removed from vCenter.
- If an existing VM is migrated by a vMotion operation, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus will perform a rebase operation if necessary.
This occurs if the registry key LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy in [HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] is set to 0 or not set. If the parameter is set to 0 or not set, a local non-default administrator cannot interact with WinRM, which is the protocol IBM Spectrum Protect Plus uses to install the Windows agent for file cataloging, send commands to this agent, and get results from it.
Set the LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy registry key to 1 on the Windows guest that is being backed up with Catalog File Metadata enabled. If the key does not exist, navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] and add a DWord Registry key named LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy with a value of 1.
Procedure
To define a VMware backup job, complete the following steps:
What to do next
Action | How to |
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If you are using a Linux environment, consider creating VADP proxies to enable load sharing. | See Creating VADP proxies. |
Create a VMware restore job definition. | See Restoring VMware data. |