Vmbackuplocation

This option is only valid for VMware virtual machines. To use this option, you must have a license agreement to use IBM Spectrum Protect™ for Virtual Environments: Data Protection for VMware.

For restore operations, this option is ignored if the vmrestoretype option is set to mountcleanup or mountcleanupall.

Supported Clients

This option can be used with supported x86_64 Linux clients.

This option can be used with supported Windows clients.

Options file

This option must be specified on the command line of a backup vm or restore vm command. You cannot set this option in the client options file.

Parameters

SERVER

For backup operations, specifies that virtual machines are backed up to the IBM Spectrum Protect server.

For restore operations, specifies that virtual machines are restored from the IBM Spectrum Protect server.

This value is the default.

LOCAL

For backup operations, specifies that virtual machines are backed up on the hardware storage. The backup is a full virtual machine image snapshot, even if an incremental backup is specified.

To create a local backup, the virtual machine must be stored in a VMware virtual volume (VVOL) datastore. If any virtual disk of the virtual machine is not in a VVOL datastore, the local backup is not allowed.

For restore operations, specifies that virtual machines are restored from persisted snapshots that are on the hardware storage.

By restoring from a local snapshot, you can only revert an existing virtual machine. You cannot restore a deleted virtual machine, and you cannot restore a virtual machine to a different name or location.

Local restore is not valid if the following parameters are used for the restore vm command:

• VMNAME
• DATACENTER
• HOST
• DATASTORE
• :vmdk

This value is also not valid if the vmrestoretype option is set to one of the following values. If these values are set, an error message is displayed.

• instantaccess
• instantrestore
• mount

Because no network data movement is needed for local snapshots, backup and restore operations can be faster than server backup and restore operations.

BOTH

For backup operations, specifies that virtual machines are backed up to the IBM Spectrum Protect server and are also backed up locally. The local backup is always a full image snapshot of the VMs, even if incremental backups are configured for the server.

For restore operations, specifies that virtual machines are restored from the latest active version regardless whether it is a local or a server backup. If both active backups have the same timestamp, the local backup is used for the restore.

This value is not valid with the parameters and vmrestoretype option values that are listed above for the LOCAL value.