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PowerProtect Data Manager 19.11 Virtual Machine User Guide

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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.

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. It is recommended 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 VMC-on-AWS, AVS-on-Azure, or GCVE-on-GCP operations.
NOTE Cloud-based deployments of PowerProtect Data Manager do not support the configuration of data-traffic routing or VLANs. 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. Click Next to skip the Networks Configuration page..
  6. 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 VMC-on-AWS, AVS-on-Azure, and GCVE-on-GCP operations. 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 VMC-on-AWS, AVS-on-Azure, or GCVE-on-GCP 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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