Configuring Data Protection for VMware

By default, Data Protection for VMware provides application consistency when you back up virtual machines that are hosting Microsoft Exchange Servers. With these backups, you can recover the virtual machine with Microsoft Exchange Server in a consistent state.

About this task

To recover only select databases or mailboxes from this type of backup with Tivoli® Storage Manager, without having to recover the entire virtual machine, preserve information about the state of the Microsoft Exchange Server at the time of the virtual machine snapshot and backup. This information is collected as part of the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) interaction that occurs during a virtual machine snapshot.

For Data Protection for VMware to collect the Microsoft VSS metadata for Microsoft Exchange Server, Data Protection for VMware needs to be configured to obtain this information from the virtual machine during the backup task.

Complete the following steps to configure Data Protection for VMware to protect Microsoft Exchange Server workloads.

Procedure

  1. Configure Data Protection for VMware to preserve the Microsoft VSS metadata information during a virtual machine backup for systems hosting Microsoft Exchange data.
    1. Locate the options file for the Data Protection for VMware data mover. On Windows systems, the options file is dsm.opt. On Linux systems, the options file is dsm.sys.
    2. Specify the INCLUDE.VMTSMVSS option for the virtual machine. You must set this option for virtual machine backups to preserve the Microsoft VSS metadata information. The information is going to be used by Data Protection for Microsoft Exchange Server at recovery time. Example: INCLUDE.VMTSMVSS vm_display_name
    3. Verify that the VMDKs that host the Microsoft Exchange Server database are not being excluded from the virtual machine backup operation. Repeat this step for all data movers that protect virtual machines that are hosting Microsoft Exchange Server.
  2. On each data mover, for example, datamover10, store the guest virtual machine credentials to Data Protection for VMware by running the following command from the Tivoli Storage Manager backup-archive client command line: 
    dsmc set password –type=vmguest vm_guest_display_name 
guest_admin_ID guest_admin_pw
    This command stores the guest virtual machine credentials encrypted on the system that hosts the data mover.

What to do next

(Optional) You can verify the virtual machine backup configuration, including that the VMDKs are being included. In addition, you can view other parameters by issuing the backup command with the preview option through the backup-archive client command line. The following command sample is available. 
dsmc backup vm vm_display_name -preview -asnode=datacenter_node
To run a virtual machine backup, you can also use the Tivoli Storage Manager scheduler to schedule periodic backups of all of your virtual machines. For verification, you can also back up the virtual machine that is hosting the Microsoft Exchange Server by using the backup-archive client command line: 
dsmc backup vm vm_display_name -asnode=datacenter_node