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PowerProtect Data Manager 19.11 Virtual Machine User Guide

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Transport mode considerations

Review the following information for recommendations and best practices when selecting a transport mode to use for virtual machine data protection operations and Tanzu Kubernetes guest cluster protection in PowerProtect Data Manager.

Hot Add transport mode recommended for large workloads

For workloads where full backups of large sized virtual machines or backups of virtual machines with a high data change rate are being performed, Hot Add transport mode provides improved performance over other modes. With Hot Add transport mode, a VM Direct Engine must be deployed on the same ESXi host or cluster that hosts the production virtual machines. During data protection operations, a VM Direct Engine capable of performing Hot Add backups is recommended. The following selection criteria is used during data protection operations:

  • If a VM Direct Engine is configured in Hot Add only mode, then this engine is used to perform Hot Add virtual machine backups. If one or more virtual machines are busy, then the backup is queued until the virtual machine is available.
  • If a virtual machine is in a cluster where the VM Direct Engine is not configured in Hot Add mode, or the VM Direct Engine with Hot Add mode configured is disabled or in a failed state, then PowerProtect Data Manager selects a VM Direct Engine within the cluster that can perform data protection operations in NBD mode. Any VM Direct Engine with Hot Add mode configured that is not in the cluster is not used.
  • Any VM Direct Engine that is configured in NBD only mode, or in Hot Add mode with failback to NBD, is used to perform NBD virtual machine backups. If every VM Direct Engine that is configured in NBD mode is busy, then the backup is queued until one of these engines is available.
  • If there is no VM Direct Engine that is configured in NBD mode, or the VM Direct Engine with NBD mode configured is disabled or in a failed state, then the PowerProtect Data Manager embedded VM Direct engine is used to perform the NBD backup.

Other transport mode recommendations

Review the following additional transport mode recommendations:

  • Use Hot Add mode for faster backups and restores and less exposure to network routing, firewall, and SSL certificate issues. To support Hot Add mode, deploy the VM Direct Engine on an ESXi host that has a path to the storage that holds the target virtual disks for backup.
    NOTE Hot Add mode requires VMware hardware version 7 or later. Ensure all virtual machines that you want to back up are using Virtual Machine hardware version 7 or later.
  • In order for backup and recovery operations to use Hot Add mode on a VMware Virtual Volume (vVol) datastore, the VM Direct proxy should reside on the same vVol as the virtual machine.
  • If you have vFlash-enabled disks and are using Hot Add transport mode, ensure that you configure the vFlash resource for the VM Direct host with sufficient resources (greater than or equal to the virtual machine resources), or migrate the VM Direct Engine to a host with vFlash already configured. Otherwise, backup of any vFlash-enabled disks fails with the error VDDK Error: 13: You do not have access rights to this file and the error on the vCenter server The available virtual flash resource '0' MB ('0' bytes) is not sufficient for the requested operation.
  • For sites that contain many virtual machines that do not support Hot Add requirements, Network Block Device (NBD) transport mode is used. This mode can cause congestion on the ESXi host management network. Plan your backup network carefully for large scale NBD installs, for example, consider configuring one of the following options:
    • Setting up Management network redundancy.
    • Setting up backup network to ESXi for NBD.
    • Setting up storage heartbeats.

    See https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/vmw-vsphere-high-availability-whitepaper.pdf for more information.

  • If performing NBD backups, ensure that your network has a bandwidth of 10 Gbps or higher.

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