vRanger 7.8.6 - User Guide

Including hard disks of physical machines or VMs

The Hard Disk Inclusion page follows the Virtual Machine Exclusion page. If you selected a single VM or are backing up physical servers, you see only the Hard Disk Inclusion page.

The Machine Hard Disk Inclusion page creates a rule for vRanger to use when determining which disks to back up.

When you create a backup job for one server, the rule tells vRanger which disks to back up for that server. When you create a job for multiple servers, however, the rule determines which disks are backed up for every server.

When protecting a VM, the Current Virtual Machines pane lists the servers included in the backup job, based on your selections in the Excluding VMs procedure. The Include Hard Disks pane represents the maximum number of disks configured for any server in the job. For example, if you have a backup job with multiple single-disk servers and one server with six disks, the Include Hard Disks column shows six entries. Selecting “Hard Disk 1” through “Hard Disk 6” tells vRanger to back up every disk for each server.

If, in the preceding example, the six-disk server receives an extra disk, that disk is not going to be backed up, because only six disks are included in the rule. To allow for future growth, the Show all disk possibilities option lets you select all potential disks; selecting this option ensures that any disk added to a server in the future is included in the backup job.

Selecting a repository

On the Repository Selection page of the wizard, you can select the repository to which the job should send the backup data. You can also add a repository from this page. For more information, see Adding a repository.

vRanger supports the following repository options for storing backup archives:

NOTE: Any storage device or appliance that supports CIFS or NFSv3 is expected to be compatible with vRanger.

NOTE: Quest RDA and EMC DDB repositories support repository replication. Only one repository can be configured per backup job. For more information on configuring repository replication, see Managing repository replication.

NOTE: When using Quest RDA or EMC DD Boost repositories, you may configure the repository to replicate savepoints to another like device. For more information, see Managing repository replication.

Selecting a backup data transport method for VMware machines

In vRanger, the transport determines how backup data is sent, and where the backup processing activity occurs; for more information, see VMware backup transport options. When configuring a backup job for a VMware® VM, the Backup Wizard, by default, uses the Automatic Transport Selection option to select the best transport method at run-time automatically; you can also configure the transport manually by using the Using Custom transport selection option.

NOTE: The Transport Selection page is not available when backing up a physical machine or Hyper-V® virtual server. Because only one transport method is available for Hyper-V and physical servers, the Transport Selection page of the Backup Wizard does not display.

To select a backup data transport method for VMware machines, complete one of the following procedures:

Using Automatic transport selection

The Backup Wizard includes an Automatic transport selection option, which lets vRanger select the best available method for your configuration. When determining the best transport, vRanger uses two key criteria:

The logic used to select a transport differs slightly based on whether vRanger is installed on a VM or on a physical server. For more information about the order in which vRanger checks for transport availability, see Transport selection order: VM backup.

IMPORTANT: Each time the job runs, vRanger detects your configuration and selects the best transport method available at run-time. That method might not always be what is shown on the page during the job setup.