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PowerProtect Data Manager 19.10 Kubernetes User Guide

Add a VM Direct Engine

Perform the following steps in the Protection Engines window of the PowerProtect Data Manager UI to deploy an external VM Direct Engine, also referred to as a VM proxy. The VM Direct Engine facilitates data movement for virtual machine protection policies, Kubernetes cluster protection policies that require a VM proxy instead of the cProxy, and network attached storage (NAS) protection policies.

Prerequisites

Review the sections Requirements for an external VM Direct Engine, Transport mode considerations, and Protection engine limitations.

If applicable, complete all of the virtual network configuration tasks before you assign any virtual networks. The PowerProtect Data Manager Administration and User Guide provides more information.

About this task

The PowerProtect Data Manager software comes bundled with an embedded VM Direct Engine, which is automatically used as a fallback proxy for performing backups and restores when the added external proxies fail or are disabled. Dell Technologies recommends that you deploy external proxies by adding a VM Direct Engine for the following reasons:
  • An external VM Direct Engine for VM proxy backup and recovery can provide improved performance and reduce network bandwidth utilization by using source-side deduplication.
  • The embedded VM Direct Engine has limited capacity for backup streams.
  • The embedded VM Direct Engine is not supported for VMware Cloud on AWS operations.

An external VM Direct Engine is not required for virtual machine protection policies that use the Transparent Snapshot Data Mover (TSDM) protection mechanism. For these policies, the embedded VM Direct Engine is sufficient.

NOTE Cloud-based OVA deployments of PowerProtect Data Manager do not support the configuration of data-traffic routing or VLANs. Those deployments skip the Networks Configuration page.

Steps

  1. From the left navigation pane, select Infrastructure > Protection Engines.
    The Protection Engines window appears.
  2. In the VM Direct Engines pane of the Protection Engines window, click Add.
    The Add Protection Engine wizard displays.
  3. On the Protection Engine Configuration page, complete the required fields, which are marked with an asterisk.
    • Hostname, Gateway, IP Address, Netmask, and Primary DNS—Note that only IPv4 addresses are supported.
    • vCenter to Deploy—If you have added multiple vCenter server instances, select the vCenter server on which to deploy the protection engine.
      NOTE Ensure that you do not select the internal vCenter server.
    • ESX Host/Cluster—Select on which cluster or ESXi host you want to deploy the protection engine.
    • Network—Displays all the networks that are available under the selected ESXi Host/Cluster. For virtual networks (VLANs), this network carries Management traffic.
    • Data Store—Displays all datastores that are accessible to the selected ESXi Host/Cluster based on ranking (whether the datastores are shared or local), and available capacity (the datastore with the most capacity appearing at the top of the list).

      You can choose the specific datastore on which the protection engine resides, or leave the default selection of <automatic> to allow PowerProtect Data Manager to determine the best location to host the protection engine.

    • Transport Mode—Select Hot Add.
    • Supported Protection Type—Select whether this protection engine is intended for Virtual Machine, Kubernetes Tanzu guest cluster, or NAS asset protection.
  4. Click Next.
  5. On the Networks Configuration page:
    If this is a cloud-based OVA deployment of PowerProtect Data Manager, click Next and proceed to step 7.

    The Networks Configuration page configures the virtual network (VLAN) to use for Data traffic. To continue without virtual network configuration, leave the Preferred Network Portgroup selection blank and then click Next.

    1. From the Preferred Network Portgroup list, select a VST (Virtual Switch Tagging) or VGT (Virtual Guest Tagging) network.
      If you select a VGT portgroup, the list displays all virtual networks within the trunk range. If you select a VST portgroup, the list displays only the virtual network for the current VLAN ID.
    2. Select one or more virtual networks from the list.

      A protection engine requires an IP address from the static IP pool for each selected virtual network. If there are not enough IP addresses in a pool, the wizard prompts you to supply additional addresses for that network.

      Ensure that the selected virtual networks support a traffic type that is compatible with protection engines. The PowerProtect Data Manager Administration and User Guide provides more information about traffic types.

    3. If required, type an available static IP address or IP address range in the Additional IP Addresses column for the indicated virtual network.

      For convenience when working with multiple virtual networks, you can also use one of the Auto Expand options:

      • Expand Last IP—The wizard increments the host portion of the last IP address in the static IP pool. Click Apply.
      • Same Last Digit—The wizard adds the network portion of the IP address to the specified value. Type the host portion of the IP address and then click Apply.

      The wizard updates the value in the Additional IP addresses column for each selected network. Verify the proposed IP addresses.

    4. Click Next.
  6. When adding a VM Direct Engine for Kubernetes guest cluster protection, add a second network interface card (NIC) if the PowerProtect controller pod running in the guest cluster cannot reach the vProxy on the primary network. Provide information for the second NIC, and then click Next.
  7. On the Summary page, review the information and then click Finish.
    The protection engine is added to the VM Direct Engines pane. An additional column indicates the engine purpose. Note that it can take several minutes to register the new protection engine in PowerProtect Data Manager. The protection engine also appears in the vSphere Client.

Results

When an external VM Direct Engine is deployed and registered, PowerProtect Data Manager uses this engine instead of the embedded VM Direct Engine for any data protection operations that involve virtual machine protection policies. If every external VM Direct Engine is unavailable, PowerProtect Data Manager uses the embedded VM Direct Engine as a fallback to perform limited scale backups and restores. If you do not want to use the external VM Direct Engine, you can disable this engine. Additional VM Direct actions provides more information.

NOTE The external VM Direct Engine is always required for VMware Cloud on AWS operations, Kubernetes cluster protection policies that require a VM Proxy instead of the cProxy, and NAS protection policies. If no external VM Direct Engine is available for these solutions, data protection operations fail.

Next steps

If the protection engine deployment fails, review the network configuration of PowerProtect Data Manager in the System Settings window to correct any inconsistencies in network properties. After successfully completing the network reconfiguration, delete the failed protection engine and then add the protection engine in the Protection Engines window.

When configuring the VM Direct Engine in a VMware Cloud on AWS environment, if you deploy the VM Direct Engine to the root of the cluster instead of inside the Compute-ResourcePool, you must move the VM Direct Engine inside the Compute-ResourcePool.


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