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Protect your virtual machines data

Contributors netapp-manishc netapp-soumikd netapp-tonacki
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BlueXP backup and recovery for virtual machines provides data protection capabilities by backing up datastores and restoring virtual machines.

You can back up datastores to Amazon Web Services S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, Google Cloud Platform, and StorageGRID and restore virtual machines back to the on-premises SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere host. BlueXP backup and recovery for virtual machines also supports connector proxy deployment model.

Before you begin

Read the following requirements to make sure that you have a supported configuration before you start backing up datastores and virtual machines to a cloud provider.

  • SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere 4.6P1 or later

    • You should be using SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere 4.7P1 or later to back up datastores from on-premises secondary storage.

  • ONTAP 9.8 or later

  • BlueXP

  • NFS and VMFS datastores are supported. vVols are not supported.

  • For VMFS support, SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere host should be running on 4.9 or later. Ensure to take a backup of the VMFS datastore if the SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere host was upgraded from an earlier version to the 4.9 release.

  • At least one backup should have been taken in SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere 4.6P1.

  • At least one daily, weekly, or monthly policy in SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere with no label or same label as that of the Virtual Machines policy in BlueXP.

  • For pre-canned policy, the schedule tier should be the same for the datastore in SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere and in the cloud.

  • Ensure that there are no FlexGroup volumes in the datastore because backing up and restoring FlexGroup volumes are not supported.

  • Disable "_recent" on the required resource groups. If you have "_recent" enabled for the resource group, then the backups of those resource groups cannot be used for data protection to cloud and subsequently cannot be used for the restore operation.

  • Ensure that the destination datastore where the virtual machine will be restored has enough space to accommodate a copy of all virtual machine files such as VMDK, VMX, VMSD, and so on.

  • Ensure that the destination datastore does not have stale virtual machine files in the format of restore_xxx_xxxxxx_filename from the previous restore operation failures. You should delete the stale files before triggering a restore operation.

  • To deploy a connector with proxy configured, ensure that all outgoing connector calls are routed through the proxy server.

  • If a volume backing up a datastore is already protected from the Volumes tab (BlueXP Backup and recovery → Volumes), then the same datastore cannot be protected again from the Virtual Machines tab (BlueXP Backup and recovery → Virtual Machines).

The following image shows each component and the connections that you need to prepare between them:

architecture diagram