VMware virtual machines

If ESXi servers belong to a vCenter and both are accessible on the network, Unitrends recommends that you add the vCenter and its ESXi servers to the appliance. This enables the appliance to contact the vCenter for management operations (including vMotion support) and to directly contact the ESXi servers for backup and recovery, potentially improving performance by reducing network traffic around the vCenter server.

If the ESXi servers are accessible through a vCenter, adding the vCenter to the Unitrends appliance automatically detects all of the associated ESXi servers and their hosted virtual machines. This also enables the Unitrends appliance to be compatible with vMotion, a process through which VMs can migrate among the vCenter’s ESXi servers. In this case, the appliance detects when VMs move between ESXi servers in a cluster and contacts the appropriate server to perform backups.

Must be running a paid, licensed version listed in the Unitrends Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix.

Must be running a licensed version listed in the Unitrends Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix.

Note:  Additional requirements and limitations apply to vCenter 6, 6.5, 6.7, 7.0, and 8.0. See Additional VMware requirements for details.

An account with full administrative privileges is required. The user or group must have the role administrator. You supply these credentials when adding the vCenter or ESXi server to the backup appliance.

Verify the following VM configuration settings:

Note:  VMware introduced new SATA Virtual Hardware Controllers with vSphere 5.5 and VM Hardware Version 10. See Cannot backup VMs with unsupported devices on ESXi 5.5 host for details on selecting the correct controller when creating new VMs in version 5.5.

CBT is required to run incremental and differential backups. Running a full backup enables CBT on the VM disks as long as:

To protect VMs hosted in vCenter 8.0 or ESXi 8.0, the following requirements and limitations apply:

To protect VMs hosted in vCenter 7.0 or ESXi 7.0, the following requirements and limitations apply:

To protect VMs hosted in vCenter 6.7 or ESXi 6.7, the following requirements and limitations apply:

To protect VMs hosted in vCenter 6.5 or ESXi 6.5, the following requirements and limitations apply:

For VMs hosted in vCenter 6 or ESXi 6, the following limitation applies:

If a vCenter 6 VM migrates to a different vCenter, that VM is no longer protected on the original Unitrends schedule. You must manually add it to a new schedule to resume protection.

To protect VMware clustered environments, you must add the vCenter to your Unitrends appliance.

To protect VMware templates, you must add the vCenter to your Unitrends appliance.

Raw device mapping (RDM) is a feature of ESXi that allows a virtual disk in a VM to be created on a remote iSCSI LUN rather than on a datastore local to the ESX server. VMs with virtual-mode raw device mapped disks are supported with the following limitations:

For ESXi hosts whose datastores are located on an external SAN, configure SAN-direct backups. This configuration enables the job to move data directly from the external SAN to the backup appliance during the backup. This direct connection increases backup performance and decreases network bandwidth utilization, affording greater scheduling flexibility as the production network is not used during the backup.

See VMware SAN-direct backups for requirements and setup procedures.

For ESXi hosts whose datastores are located on an external SAN, configure backups to use the HotAdd transport mode. This configuration enables the job to move data directly from the external SAN to the appliance during the backup. This direct connection increases backup performance and decreases network bandwidth utilization, affording greater scheduling flexibility as the production network is not used during the backup.

See VMware HotAdd backups for requirements and setup procedures.

For Exchange and SQL simple recovery model databases that are hosted on VMware virtual machines, apply local administrator credentials to the VM to run application-aware backups. For details, see Protecting VMware virtual machines with file-level backups.

To ensure database consistency, you must set up the virtualized Active Directory (AD) server in accordance with Microsoft best practices. If all Microsoft considerations are not addressed, backup and restore of the virtual machine may yield undesired results. If you prefer not to research these best practices, install the agent on the VM and protect it as you would a physical server (leveraging Microsoft’s VSS writers).