PowerProtect Data Manager 19.9 Administration and User Guide

Unsupported virtual machine configurations

The following virtual machines and configurations are not supported for TSDM virtual machine protection:

• vVOL Datastores
• Physical RDMs
• Virtual RDMs
• Encrypted virtual machines
• Fault Tolerant virtual machines.

Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) limit for virtual machines protected with TSDM

TSDM-based protection supports a maximum of 40 VMDKs per virtual machine. If this limit is exceeded, backups will be queued for a longer period of time, and will have to be cancelled manually.

For virtual machines with more than 40 VMDKs, you can override the protection mechanism at the asset level to use VADP. The section Migrating assets to use the Transparent Snapshot Data Mover provides more information.

vMotion of TSDM protected virtual machines

vSphere disables the vMotion migration of virtual machines to an ESXi host version previous to 7.0 U3 when the virtual machine is protected with TSDM. In order to migrate the TSDM protected virtual machine to an ESXi version that does not support TSDM, you must disable the Lightweight Delta (LWD) filter that is attached to the virtual machine during the initial protection policy configuration. To disable the filter, remove the virtual machine from the TSDM protected virtual machine protection policy. Once the virtual machine is removed from the policy, a job is automatically initiated to disable the filter.

Once the vMotion completes, you can re-add the virtual machine to the protection policy. This virtual machine will then be protected by the VADP protection mechanism, since the new ESXi/cluster host version is lower than the version required by TSDM.

Removal of managed snapshots required prior to running virtual machine protection policies

A PowerProtect Data Manager virtual machine protection policy cannot be configured to use the TSDM protection mechanism when the virtual machine contains managed snapshots. Verify that no managed snapshots exist for the virtual machine, and then retry the configuration job from the System Jobs window of the PowerProtect Data Manager UI.

TSDM only available for virtual machine crash-consistent policies

Use of the TSDM protection mechanism is currently only supported for crash-consistent virtual machine protection policies. Also, the virtual machine crash-consistent policy must use the Performance optimization mode, with swap file exclusion and quiescing turned off.

Cloud Disaster Recovery not supported

Cloud Disaster Recovery (CDR) is not supported for TSDM virtual machine backups up PowerProtect Data Manager 19.9.