Avamar Extended Retention is being phased out and no new installs are being permitted. AER is not required to perform backups; it was only used to provide tape-out functionality.

You can either use image level backup (for supported hypervisors, e.g. VMware, Hyper-V) or install a client agent on the VMs (or both, if necessary). Which approach you take depends on your requirements. I'd recommend working with your account team if you need assistance designing a data protection solution for your VM environment.

OK.  Thanks!  When you say "image-level" backups, you mean native VMWARE backups.  Right?

Backups of the virtual machines at the VMware level with a proxy machine that uses the VMware VADP API, yes.

thanks.  Last question:  Can i direct those backups of those VMs from the VNX, to a CIFS share target? (huge disk).  Is that possible to do?

jim

Avamar VMware Image backups only support Avamar or Avamar / Data Domain as backup targets.

you misunderstood my question.  I'm saying eliminate Avamar from the equation altogether.  Can i direct those backups of those VMs hosted on the VNX, to a CIFS share target? (huge disk).  So, VNX directly to CIFS share.  No Avamar.  No Data Domain.  Is that possible to do?

Some kind of backup software is required to drive the VADP API. VMware only provides a backup API, they do not provide out of the box functionality that will let you dump a virtual machine backup to arbitrary storage.

Thanks.  That makes sense.  Last question.....promise .   Is there anything internal to the sys mgmt software (Unisphere or other) maybe, or any kind of software that can easily be loaded onto that VNX that could make it possible to perform such a backup to a CIFS share?

I'm not aware of any such software, no.

thank you for all your help!