PowerProtect Data Manager 19.16 Virtual Machine User Guide

Configure protection policy options

On the Options page, select any additional options that are required for the policy.

1. Optimize For—Select one of the following backup optimization modes:

   Option	Description
   Performance	Optimize for backup and replication speed. Selecting this mode results in more storage consumption.
   Capacity	Optimize for backup size. Selecting this mode results in less storage consumption, but backups take longer to complete.

   NOTE:Changing the optimization mode after the first backup of the protection policy forces the next backup to be a full backup, and results in increased storage capacity usage due to differences in how each mode uses data deduplication. This increase continues until all backups performed using the previous optimization mode expire and have been deleted.
2. Exclude swap files from backup—Select this option to exclude the C:\swapfile.sys, C:\pagefile.sys, and C:\hiberfil.sys swap and memory files of Microsoft Windows virtual machines from the virtual machine backup.

   By default, this checkbox is cleared.

   NOTE:Including swap and memory files in a backup unnecessarily increases the size of the backup and the time to restore to original during recovery. These files are rebuilt by the Microsoft Windows operating system after restart, and not required for recovery.
3. Enable indexing for file search and restore—Select this option to enable indexing. This option is visible only after activating the search cluster node.
4. Enable guest file system quiescing—Select this option to enable VMware Tools for quiescing the file system during crash-consistent virtual machine backups.
5. Protection Mechanism—Select whether to use VADP or Transparent Snapshots as the data mover.

   These data movers are supported for both virtual machine crash consistent and application aware policies. However, in some circumstances, PowerProtect Data Manager might determine that Transparent Snapshots Data Mover (TSDM) cannot be used to protect some assets. In these cases, VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection (VADP) will be automatically used as the protection mechanism instead of TSDM, even if Transparent Snapshots is selected.

   For example, PowerProtect Data Manager defaults to using the VADP protection mechanism when one or more of the following conditions are true:

   • The ESXi host and vCenter server versions are earlier than 7.0 U3c.
   • The protection policy is a virtual machine crash-consistent policy and is configured with Exclude swap files from backup or Enable guest file system quiescing enabled. If either of these selections are checked, VADP will be selected as the protection mechanism by default and the Protection Mechanism list will be greyed out.
   • The virtual machine has Fault Tolerance enabled.
   • The virtual machine has virtual or physical Raw Device Mappings (RDM).
   • The virtual machine has more than 40 virtual machine disks (VMDKs).
6. Click Next.