Backing up and restoring VMware data

To protect VMware data, first add vCenter Server instances in IBM Spectrum® Protect Plus, and then create jobs for backup and restore operations for the content of the instances.

Ensure that your VMware environment meets the system requirements in Hypervisor (Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware) and cloud instance (Amazon EC2) backup and restore requirements.

Support for VMware tags

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus supports VMware virtual machine tags. Tags are applied in vSphere and allow users to assign metadata to virtual machines. When applied in vSphere and added to the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus inventory, virtual machine tags can be viewed through the View > Tags & Categories filter when you create a job definition. For more information about VMware tagging, see Tagging Objects.

Support for encryption

Backing up and restoring encrypted virtual machines is supported in vSphere 6.5 environments and later. Encrypted virtual machines can be backed up and restored at the virtual-machine level to their original location. If you are restoring a virtual machine to an alternative location, the encrypted virtual machine is restored without encryption, and must be encrypted manually by using the vCenter Server after the restore operation is completed.

The following vCenter Server privileges are required to enable operations for encrypted virtual machines:
  • Cryptographer.Access
  • Cryptographer.AddDisk
  • Cryptographer.Clone
Note: An NFS volume may be mounted to any number of datacenters that belong to the same vCenter. If an NFS volume is mounted on more than one datacenter, vCenter treats the same volume as two different datastores. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus treats this as a single datastore and combines all of the VMs and VMDKs residing on the datastore from all of the datacenters on which the datastore is mounted. Any SLA selection against this datastore will cause all of the VMs from the different datacenters to be backed up or restored in IBM Spectrum Protect Plus.