Introducing CA ARCserve Backup Agents and Options › Using Agents › Agent for Virtual Machines › Introducing the Agent › How the Agent Protects VMware vSphere Systems Using VDDK › Introduction to Integrating with VMware vSphere

Introduction to Integrating with VMware vSphere

CA ARCserve Backup Agent for Virtual Machines integrates with the latest version of VMware Virtual Infrastructure named vSphere. This capability lets you protect virtual machines (VMs) that reside in vSphere environments (for example, the VMs reside in ESX Server 4.0 systems and vCenter Server 4.0 systems). The agent facilitates protecting VMs using VMware Virtual Consolidated Backup Framework (VCB) 1.5 Update 1 or later, and VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) 1.1 or later.

VDDK lets you access VM disks remotely on ESX Server systems without exporting the disks to the backup proxy system. Integrating with VDDK provides you with an alternative approach to using VCB Framework to back up VMs. This approach can be used only on the following VMware platforms:

• ESX Server 5.0, 4.1, 4.0, and 3.5 systems
• vCenter 5.0, 4.1, and 4.0 systems
• VirtualCenter Server 2.5 systems

VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit is a collection of APIs and management tools that let you create, manage, and access virtual storage systems. VMware VDDK is supported on x86 and x64 versions of Windows operating systems.

The primary advantages of using VDDK are as follows:

• VDDK eliminates the requirement to store VM snapshots on the backup proxy system. Using VDDK, CA ARCserve Backup can transfer data for all raw (full VM) backups directly from the ESX Server datastores to the backup media.

  Note: CA ARCserve Backup stores the sectors corresponding to disk and filesystem metadata on the backup proxy system when processing raw (full VM) backups with the Allow file level restore option specified.

• VDDK minimizes the dependency on VMware tools. Using VDDK, CA ARCserve Backup does not require VMware Virtual Consolidated Backup (VCB) to be installed on the backup proxy systems. In addition, VMware Converter is not required to recover VMs. VDDK provides more control and improved reporting for VM backup and recovery operations.

You can use the following approaches to protect your virtual machine environment:

• Through the ESX Server or ESXi Server host system--A single host can manage only the VMs contained within the host system. This approach uses VCB Framework and VDDK to perform backup and restore operations.
• Through the vCenter Server system--A vCenter Server system can manage VMs that are distributed over many ESX Server and ESXi Server host systems. This approach uses VCB Framework and VDDK to perform backup and restore operations.