PowerProtect Data Manager 19.16 Virtual Machine User Guide

Notes

• If you have more than one PowerProtect Data Manager instance protecting the same vCenter Server, do not protect the same virtual machine asset across multiple PowerProtect Data Manager instances.
• If a virtual machine hosts an instance of SQL Server, you can protect the SQL database with an application-consistent backup without interfering with the SQL agent-based backup.
• Dell Technologies recommends distributing virtual machine asset protection workloads over multiple ESXi hosts so that you do not exceed the ESXi Network Block Device (NBD) session limit. If the limit is reached, you can manage the workload by deploying an external VM Direct Engine on the host or cluster using Hot Add transport mode. Also, it is recommended during policy configuration to assign virtual machines to a protection policy based on logical grouping to allow for better scheduling of backups. Grouping helps avoid resource contention and creates more organized logs for review.
• You can only protect an asset with one policy at a time. Assets can move between protection policies, depending on the protection rule priorities. Protection rules do not automatically move assets that were manually added to a policy to a different policy.
• Before scheduling weekly, monthly, or yearly backups, set the PowerProtect Data Manager time zone to the local time zone. Otherwise, the backup still runs but is triggered based on the PowerProtect Data Manager time zone.

Initial configuration

• Enable the virtual machine asset source.
• Register the application hosts with PowerProtect Data Manager (add vCenter Servers).
• Add credentials for virtual machine assets.
• Where applicable, enable Changed Block Tracking (CBT).
• Where applicable, configure freeze and thaw scripts.
• Deploy a VM Direct protection engine.
• Where applicable, configure any necessary Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The PowerProtect Data Manager Administrator Guide provides instructions.

Objectives

• To move a backup or replica to Cloud Tier, the corresponding objectives must have a retention time of 14 days or more.

Storage

• Add protection storage.

  The PowerProtect Data Manager Administrator Guide provides more information about working with storage units, such as the relationships between storage units and policies, security considerations, and applicable limitations.

• Before you add a replication objective, add remote protection storage for the replication target.
• Before you add a Cloud Tier objective, PowerProtect Data Manager requires:
  • Protection storage set up for Cloud Tier, with the system passphrase set.
  • The discovery of protection storage with a configured Cloud unit.
  • A configured and running data movement schedule on the cloud storage unit.
  The DDOS Administration Guide provides more information.

Networking

If applicable, complete all of the virtual network configuration tasks before you assign any virtual networks to the protection policy. The PowerProtect Data Manager Administrator Guide provides more information.

Application-aware protection policies

To create application-aware protection policies for virtual machines, ensure that:

• You manually update the VMX configuration parameter disk.EnableUUID to True by using the vSphere Web Client.
• The vSphere version that you are running uses a supported version of VMware Tools. Software compatibility information for the PowerProtect Data Manager software is provided by the E-Lab Navigator.
• The virtual machine has direct access to the DD client.
• The virtual machine uses SCSI disks only, and the number of available SCSI slots matches at least the number of disks.
• The Windows account that is used for the protection policy is limited to the local system Administrator or the domain Administrator. This user requires both Microsoft Windows administrative rights and Microsoft SQL Server login and sysadmin rights.
• SQL configuration support is limited to Microsoft SQL Server stand-alone instances, a Microsoft SQL Server Always On availability group (AAG) configured with file share witness, and Microsoft SQL Server cluster-less AAG configurations. Unsupported configurations include Microsoft SQL Server failover cluster instances that are configured with shared drives, and Microsoft SQL Server cluster-less AAG configurations.
• For Microsoft SQL Server AAG configurations, the database administrator specifies the AAG backup preferences for backup in the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). These preferences control which AAG node is selected as the preferred node when you perform a transaction log backup of AAG databases.
• vCenter 7.0 U1 or later is required to protect virtual machines that use virtualization-based security (VBS) and virtual Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (vTPM).