Introducing CA ARCserve Backup Agents and Options › Using Agents › Agent for Virtual Machines › Introducing the Agent › How the Agent Protect VMware vSphere Systems Using VDDK › How to Use the Agent with VMware vSphere
How to Use the Agent with VMware vSphere
Using VMware vSphere may affect the manner in which you plan your backup infrastructure.
Without VMware vSphere, CA ARCserve Backup integrates with VMware Virtual Infrastructure (version 2.0 and 2.5) using VMware VCB Framework tools to back up VM data. With VCB Framework you must designate a Windows server to function as a backup proxy system. The backup proxy system requires a large amount of free disk space to stage the snapshot images of the VMs that you are backing up.
To recover a full VM (for example, to recover a VM from a disaster), VMware Converter must be installed on the backup proxy system. VMware provides a variety of converter tools. However, CA ARCserve Backup supports using only stand-alone versions of the converter tools.
Note: CA ARCserve Backup cannot recover VMs using enterprise versions of VMware Converter.
Integrating with VMware vSphere lets you perform the following operations:
- Back up VMs on all currently supported versions of VMware ESX Server and VMware VirtualCenter Server using VMware VCB Framework.
- Back up VMs that reside on ESX Server 4.0 systems or other hosts that are managed by vCenter Server 4.0 using VDDK.
- Back up VMs that reside on ESX Server 4.0 systems or other hosts that are managed by vCenter 4.0 using VCB Framework 1.5 Update 1.
- Back up and recover VMs that reside on ESX Server version 3.5 and version 4.0 systems, VirtualCenter Server version 2.5 and version 4.0 systems, or both, using a new approach. The new approach lets you use a combination of the APIs provided by VMware vSphere Web Service SDK and VMware VDDK, and is recommended by VMware.
Examples: How to Use the Agent with VMware vSphere
- Decreased hardware requirements--A backup proxy system is not required to facilitate backing up and recovering VMs. You can back up and recover VMs from the primary server or a member server without incurring additional overhead on the CA ARCserve Backup server.
- Eliminates the Temporary Mount location--To back up VMs in a VMware backup environment using VCB tools, a mount location with a large amount of free disk space is required on the backup proxy system. The amount of free disk space on the backup proxy system must be as large as the total size of all VMs that you can back up concurrently using multistreaming when performing raw (full VM) backups with the Allow file level restore option specified. The new approach lets CA ARCserve Backup eliminate the need to store the VM backups on the backup proxy system. As a result, the agent lets you free valuable system resources and disk space on the backup proxy system.
- Decreased software dependency--You do not need to install VCB and VMware Converter on the backup proxy system. This requirement frees valuable system resources and disk space on the backup proxy system. Using the agent with VMware vSphere requires less software to manage your VM backups and restores. If you use the new approach with VMware vSphere Web Services SDK and VDDK, you must install only VDDK on the backup proxy system to perform backup and recovery operations. This requirement improves VM reporting and simplifies the process of managing your VMs because there are fewer components that can fail.