Microsoft 365 requirements

This document details the Microsoft 365 backup and restore requirements for IBM Spectrum® Protect Plus.

Beginning with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus V10.1.5, support was added for backing up and restoring of Microsoft Office 365 data.

Product name update: Microsoft Corporation announced new product names, effective 21st April 2020, for its Office 365 offerings for small and medium businesses. With this announcement, all small and medium business plans transitioned to the new Microsoft 365 brand. In IBM Spectrum Protect Plus V10.1.6, the user interface and documentation use the original product name, Office 365. For more information, see New Microsoft 365 offerings for small and medium-sized businesses.

If you choose to protect Microsoft 365 data with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, you must purchase the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for Microsoft 365 Entity ID Monthly License. For more information about this entitlement, see the IBM Spectrum Protect V10.1.5 announcement letter.

Before you start protecting Microsoft 365 data with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, ensure that the system environment meets the following requirements.

Cloud service configuration

To protect a Microsoft 365 application, you must register the application with Azure Active Directory and grant appropriate permissions. Before you begin, you must have the following items:

Configuration

To protect a Microsoft 365 application, you must register the application with Azure Active Directory and grant appropriate permissions. Before you begin, you must have the following items:
  • An active Microsoft 365 subscription
  • A Microsoft 365 administrative user ID and password

For instructions about registering the Microsoft 365 application with Azure Active Directory, see Registering with Azure Active Directory.

If you have a Microsoft 365 administrative account, you can add users to ensure that they have valid licenses. For instructions, see Microsoft 365 in Visual Studio subscriptions.

Application versions

Table 1. Coverage matrix for application levels supported by IBM Spectrum Protect Plus
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium editions Office 365 for Enterprise E1, E3, and E5 editions Office365 for Education A1, A3, and A5 editions Office 365 for Firstline Workers F3 edition Microsoft 365 for Enterprise E3 and E5 editions
  Former product name: Office 365 Business: Business, Essentials, and Business Premium editions   Former product name: Office 365 Education edition Former product name: Microsoft 365 F1  
V10.1.5 Tick Tick Tick Tick Tick
V10.1.6 Tick Tick Tick Tick Tick
V10.1.7 Tick Tick Tick Tick Tick

Operating systems

Table 2. Coverage matrix for supported operating systems on Linux x86_64
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus RHEL 7.0* RHEL 8.0* CentOS 7.0* CentOS 8.0*
V10.1.5 Tick   Tick  
V10.1.6 Tick Tick Tick  
V10.1.7 Tick Tick Tick Tick
* The base release and later maintenance and modification levels are supported.  
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus supports proxy host server running on physical (bare metal) server and in virtualized environments.

Restrictions

The Microsoft 365 tenant must be in a global region as defined by Microsoft. National regions are not supported. For more information about regions, see National cloud deployments.

Software

  • Ensure that Java™ 8 is installed.
  • The bash and sudo packages must be installed. Sudo must be at version 1.7.6p2 or later. Run sudo -V to check the version. Tip: The required bash and sudo packages are included in the supported Linux x86_64 operating system.
  • Install the most recent Microsoft 365 patches and updates in your environment.
  • Ensure that a supported version of Linux x86_64 is installed with the most recent patches and updates.
  • The International Components for Unicode (libicu) RPM package must be installed for the corresponding version of your operating system.
  • Ensure that the most recent patches and updates are installed. The International Components for Unicode (libicu) RPM-package must be installed for the corresponding version of your operating system. Ensure that the effective file size ulimit -f value, which specifies the effective file size for the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus agent is set to unlimited. Alternatively, set the value sufficiently high to support copying of the largest Office 365 files in your backup and restore jobs.
  • In a Linux environment, depending on your version or distribution, ensure that the Linux utility package, util-linux-ng or util-linux, is current.

Connectivity

Ensure that your system environment meets the following connectivity requirements:
  • The secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) subsystem for Secure Shell (SSH) is enabled.
  • The Secure Shell (SSH) service is running on port 22 on the proxy host server.
  • Firewalls are configured to allow IBM Spectrum Protect Plus to connect to the proxy host server by using SSH.
  • Firewalls must be configured to enable the proxy host server to communicate with the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus server using by using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) via port 443.
  • IBM Spectrum Protect Plus uses the Network File System (NFS) protocol to mount storage volumes for backup and restore operations. Ensure that the native Linux NFS client is installed on the proxy host server.
  • All servers, proxies, applications, and hypervisors that are added to the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus environment must be registered by using a Domain Name System (DNS) name or Internet Protocol (IP) address.
  • If DNS names are used, they must be resolvable over the network by the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus virtual appliance server and the vSnap server. All IBM Spectrum Protect Plus components must also be resolvable by their DNS names.
  • If DNS is not available, you must add the server to the /etc/hosts file on the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus virtual appliance by using the command line.

Authentication and privileges

Authentication

  • The proxy host server must be registered with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus by using an operating system user that exists on the agent host. The user is then referred to as the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus agent user.
  • Ensure that the root user password is correctly configured and that the user can log in without facing any other prompts, such as prompts to reset the password.

Privileges

The IBM Spectrum Protect Plus agent user must have privileges to run commands as root user by using sudo. The sudoers configuration must allow the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus agent user to run commands without a password.

Prerequisites and operations

Prerequisites and operations

The following prerequisites must be met before you start protecting your resources:
  • To protect a Microsoft 365 application, you must register the application with Azure Active Directory and grant appropriate permissions. When you register a new application with Azure Active Directory, the application credentials such as application ID and application secret are made available on the Azure Active Directory portal. For instructions, see Registering with Azure Active Directory.
  • To ensure that the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus agent can connect to the Office 365 tenant, you must register the Office 365 tenant credentials, and the proxy host server with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. This procedure is necessary to ensure that Office 365 data can be backed up to IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. For instructions, see Registering the Microsoft 365 tenant with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus.

Operations

Before you start a backup or restore operation, take the following actions:
  • Apply a service level agreement (SLA) policy. For instructions, see Create backup policies.
  • Assign appropriate roles and resource groups to users who will be running backup and restore operations. Grant users access to resources and roles by using the Accounts pane.
  • To help enhance the performance of backup operations, set the number of parallel sessions to a number in the range 10 - 40.
Review the following information about creating backup and restore jobs:
  • To back up Microsoft 365 email, calendars, contacts, and data on OneDrive cloud storage, see Backing up Office 365 data.
  • To restore Microsoft 365 data from backup copies on vSnap servers or remote storage, see Restoring Office 365 data.
  • For an overview about protecting Microsoft 365 with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. For instructions, see Microsoft 365.

Ports

The following ports are used by IBM Spectrum Protect Plus agents users.

Table 3. Communication ports when the target is an IBM Spectrum Protect Plus agent user
Port Protocol Initiator Target Description
22 Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) IBM Spectrum Protect Plus server Proxy host server Provides access to troubleshoot and maintain remote proxy host servers that are running guest application components by using the SSH protocol
Table 4. Communication ports when the initiator is an IBM Spectrum Protect Plus agent user
Port Protocol Initiator Target Description
111 TCP Proxy host server vSnap server Allows Open Network Computing (ONC) clients to discover ports for communications with ONC servers
443 TCP Proxy host server vSnap server Port that allows the agent to communicate with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for sending alerts in case of log backup failures
2049 TCP Proxy host server vSnap server Used for NFS data transfer to and from vSnap servers
20048 TCP Proxy host server vSnap server Mounts vSnap file systems on clients such as the VMware vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) proxy, application servers, and virtualization datastores

Hardware

Table 5. Minimum hardware requirements
System Disk Space Memory
Compatible hardware with quad-core processors supported by the operating system 5 GB of available disk space for temporary files at run time 16 GB of random access memory (RAM) and8 processors (4 cores each)