Protected assets

Credentials are used to establish a trust relationship between the Unitrends appliance and its assets. Once you apply a credential to an asset, the appliance can only access the asset using the associated administrative username and password. If the username and password are not valid, access is denied.

You can apply credentials when adding or editing the following asset types:

●   Virtual hosts - Credentials are required for each vCenter, ESXi, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, or XenServer host asset you add to the appliance. These credentials are required for the Unitrends appliance to run host-level backup and recovery jobs for hosted virtual machines (VMs). You must enter credentials when you add the virtual host.

●   Agent-based assets - Credentials are optional for assets (typically physical machines) that you add individually. Credentials are recommended for Windows assets to enable push-installation of the Unitrends agent and agent updates. When you add an asset, you can enter new credentials or apply existing credentials.

●   NAS assets - Credentials are required only if the NAS share is configured for authentication. Enter NAS credentials while you add the NAS asset.

●   Hosted virtual machines - After you add a virtual host, any hosted VMs are discovered and display in the inventory tree under their virtual host. Credentials are required to enable application-aware protection of VMware Windows VMs and are optional for other VMs. Edit a VM asset to add new credentials or apply existing credentials.

●   Hosted applications - When you add an asset, any hosted applications are discovered and display in the inventory tree under their host machines. Credentials are required for these applications: Cisco UCS, NDMP, Oracle, and SharePoint full farm installations. Credentials are optional for other application types. For considerations and requirements, see Application Backups Overview.

The Unitrends appliance ingests new backups and retains them until additional backup storage space is needed. The oldest backups are then purged to make room for newer ones. However, the Unitrends appliance will not delete the latest backups of any type for a given asset, or any backups that are held by a retention policy.

Retention policies assure that the necessary recovery points are available on your appliance. Furthermore, backups can be copied to an off-site target as described in Backup copies.

Appliances are configured with a default backup retention policy of 30 days. This 30-day policy is applied to each protected asset. To apply custom retention policies, see Managing retention with long-term data management.

Use the this option to encrypt an asset's backups using an AES-256 bit algorithm. Before an asset's backups can be encrypted, you must set up encryption on the appliance as described in Encryption. To encrypt an asset's backups, Use the Edit Asset dialog. (Go to Configure > Protected Assets, select the asset in the list, click Edit Asset, then select an encryption setting in the Encrypt Backups drop-down.

For host-level backups of VMware, AHV, and XenServer VMs, quiesce settings determine how the VM is brought to a consistent state in preparation for backup. (Quiesce settings do not apply to Hyper-V VMs.) Unitrends provides these quiesce settings: crash consistent, application consistent, and application aware. Detailed descriptions of each setting are described in the table below.

Consider the following when working with quiesce settings:

●   For appliances that were deployed with release 9.1 or later, crash consistent is the default quiesce setting for newly added virtual hosts and VMs.

●   For appliances that were deployed with a pre-9.1 release, application consistent is the default quiesce setting for newly added virtual hosts and VMs. The application consistent default persists upon upgrading to later releases.

●   The application aware setting must be applied to VMs individually. Applying a quiesce setting globally or to one host's VMs does not overwrite a VM's application aware quiesce setting. A VM's quiesce setting is overwritten only if it was set to crash consistent or application consistent.

●   Backups are run using a cascading fall-back approach. If a backup attempt fails, the appliance tries again with a less stringent quiesce setting:

●   Application aware falls back to application consistent.

●   Application consistent falls back to crash consistent.

●   If crash consistent fails, the backup fails. (There is no fall back.)

●   For VMware and AHV, a backup that was run with a lesser quiesce setting is marked with a Warning status.

●   For XenServer, a backup that was run with a lesser quiesce setting is NOT marked with a Warning status.

●   To determine which quiesce setting was used, go to the Backup History report and select the backup. Detailed messages display in the Backup Status window. Look at the Snapshot for this Backup was created with... entry in the vProtect Messages, aProtect Messages,or xProtect Messages section.

Detailed descriptions of each quiesce setting are given in the following table:

Quiesce setting	Description	Apply globally to all VMs	Apply to one host's VMs	Apply to selected VMs
Crash consistent	The VM is not quiesced before the backup runs. The backup takes a snapshot of the VM disks in their current state. This is the fastest quiesce setting.	Apply to newly discovered VMs by selecting Crash Consistent in the Global Virtual Machine Settings dialog. Optionally, use Apply to all current VMs to apply to existing VMs. For details, see To manage global quiesce settings.	To apply to one host's VMs, select Overwrite this hypervisor's VMs to Crash Consistent in the Edit Virtual Host dialog. For details, see To apply a quiesce setting to one host's VMs.	To apply to one or more selected VMs, select Crash Consistent in the Edit Assets dialog. For details, see To edit a virtual machine asset.
Application consistent	The VM guest operating system invokes processes to flush application and filesystem transactions and place the VM into an idle state while a VM disk snapshot is taken.	Apply to newly discovered VMs by selecting Application Consistent in the Global Virtual Machine Settings dialog. Optionally, use Apply to all current VMs to apply to existing VMs. For details, see To manage global quiesce settings.	To apply to hosted VMs, select Overwrite this hypervisor's VMs to Application Consistent in the Edit Virtual Host dialog. For details, see To apply a quiesce setting to one host's VMs.	To apply to one or more selected VMs, select Application Consistent in the Edit Assets dialog. For details, see To edit a virtual machine asset.
Application aware (VMware Windows VMs only)	Use this option for application-aware protection of hosted Exchange or SQL simple recovery model applications. Leverages VSS writers to provide application consistent quiesce and additional post-backup processing. Exchange logs are truncated with VMware full and incremental backups. SQL logs are not truncated. See Recommendations for protecting SQL databases hosted on VMware virtual machines for best practices.	Not applicable. Must be applied to VMs individually.	Not applicable. Must be applied to VMs individually.	Apply to one or more selected VMs. To set up application-aware protection, use the Edit Assets dialog to supply administrative credentials and to select the Application Aware quiesce setting. For details, see Using application aware quiesce.