PowerProtect Data Manager 19.11 Virtual Machine User Guide

VM Direct protection engine overview

The VM Direct protection engine provides two functions within PowerProtect Data Manager:

• A virtual machine data protection solution—Deploy a VM Direct Engine in the vSphere environment to perform virtual machine snapshot backups, which improves performance and reduces network bandwidth utilization by using the protection storage source-side deduplication.
• A Tanzu Kubernetes guest cluster data protection solution—Deploy a VM Direct Engine in the vSphere environment for protection of vSphere CSI-based persistent volumes, for which it is required to use a VM Proxy instead of the cProxy, for the management and transfer of backup data.

The VM Direct protection engine is enabled after you add a vCenter server in the Asset Sources window, and allows you to collect VMware entity information from the vCenter server and save VMware virtual machines and Tanzu Kubernetes guest cluster namespaces and PVCs as PowerProtect Data Manager resources for the purposes of backup and recovery.

To view statistics for the VM Direct Engine, manage and monitor VM Direct appliances, and add an external VM Direct appliance to facilitate data movement, select Infrastructure > Protection Engines. Add a VM Direct Engine provides more information.

When you add an external VM Direct appliance, the VM Direct Engines pane provides the following information:

• The VM Direct appliance IP address, name, gateway, DNS, network, and build version. This information is useful for troubleshooting network issues.
• The vCenter and ESXi server hostnames.
• The VM Direct appliance status (green check mark if the VM Direct appliance is ready, red x if the appliance is not fully operational). The status includes a short explanation to help you troubleshoot the VM Direct Engine if the VM Direct appliance is not in a fully operational state.
• The transport mode that you selected when adding the VM Direct appliance (Hot Add, Network Block Device, or the default setting Hot Add, Failback to Network Block Device).