NetVault Plug-in for VMware 12.3.3.5

NetVault Plug-in for VMware 12.3.3.5 - User Guide

Introducing NetVault

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About NetVault

Quest® NetVault® (Plug‑in for VMware) protects your virtual machines from disaster, media failure, and data corruption. Its intuitive, easy-to-use interface gives you a single, centralized console to configure backup and restore policies for your virtual environments. The Plug‑in for VMware is integrated with VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection, formerly known as VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP). It allows you to protect your virtual environment without the need for complex scripting or deep understanding of VMware ESXi or VADP internals. The plug-in minimizes downtime by allowing you to restore complete virtual machine images or individual files quickly and reliably with minimal interaction. Through automatic integration with a wide range of backup devices, your virtualized data can be protected and safely stored off-site to meet your disaster recovery and business continuity goals.


	NOTE: The NetVault Backup Plug-ins for applications such as SQL Server, Exchange, or SharePoint can be combined with the Plug‑in for VMware to provide comprehensive protection to your data. The Plug‑in for VMware provides bare metal recovery for virtual machines. The application plug-ins simplify data protection of business-critical applications by automating the backup and recovery processes and performing important maintenance functions such as transaction log truncation.

Key benefits

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Improve VMware ESXi performance with vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP): The Plug‑in for VMware works with VADP to provide centralized backups that reduce the load on ESXi Servers and backup traffic on the Local Area Network. This approach is especially important if you must consolidate hardware. You have the flexibility to protect all your virtual machines deployed on a single ESXi Server or protect multiple ESXi Servers from a single NetVault Backup Client. With VMware vSphere Storage vMotion (Storage vMotion), the plug-in is able to protect your virtual machines without requiring detailed knowledge of their location.

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Increase confidence while deploying VMware: The Plug‑in for VMware protects individual ESXi Servers and a full VMware vCenter environment. It empowers you to create comprehensive, flexible backup policies without the need for complex scripting or deep understanding of VADP. The plug-in provides peace of mind because you point-and-click to back up or restore virtual machines. It increases efficiency by consolidating virtual machine backup management into a single environment, improving storage administration efficiency. The solution enhances protection for Windows-based virtual machines by performing VSS-based snapshots to quiesce applications before backup.

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Automatic integration of backup devices ensures business continuity: The Plug‑in for VMware supports a wide range of backup devices, allowing you to store your backup data on disk-based storage devices, virtual tape libraries, or physical tape libraries. It ensures that your virtualized environments are protected and stored off-site for disaster recovery purposes. The plug-in also frees administrators from being available 24x7 by allowing less experienced VMware administrators to initiate restores correctly and as quickly as possible, reducing downtime and improving business continuity.

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Shorten backup windows and improve device utilization: The Plug‑in for VMware speeds virtual machine image-based backups with high-performance Incremental and Differential Backups for data stored in virtual machines. The plug-in integrates with the Changed Block Tracking (CBT) feature to ensure that only blocks that have changed since the initial Full and the last Incremental or Differential Backup are sent to the current Incremental or Differential backup stream. This integration provides more efficient backups and reduced network demands.

The Plug‑in for VMware also preserves the use of the VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning feature during virtual machine recovery operations to control storage costs and protect data. It performs this task by ensuring virtual machine disks only use the amount of storage they currently need while being able to dynamically add more allocated space as required.

Feature summary

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Supports VADP-based online backups

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Creates VSS-based snapshots for application-consistent backups

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Allows CBT-based Full, Incremental, and Differential image-level backups of virtual machines

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Supports backup and restore of Thin Provisioned Disks

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Enables backup and restore of virtual machines within a Virtual Application (vApp)

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Supports Storage vMotion using the vSphere virtual machine locking API

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Supports backup and restore of virtual machines that are protected using VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance (vSphere FT), when managed under a vCenter Server by VMware ESXi hosts that use version 6.0 build number 4192238 or later

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Support for inclusion and exclusion configuration of virtual machine names for use with backup selection

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Supports file-level restores on Linux and UNIX for:

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Extended file systems: EXT2, EXT3, and EXT4

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Extents File System (XFS) versions 2 and 3 (v2 and v3)

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Reduces backup windows by backing up multiple virtual machines in parallel

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Reduces network and storage requirements with Active Block Mapping (ABM)


	NOTE: ABM is not supported with XFS.

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Supports distributed image-level backups and restores, which ensures that jobs run across multiple NetVault Backup Clients acting as backup proxies. Using load-balancing, the plug-in includes a Distributed Jobs feature that lets you transfer jobs to any other available VMware backup proxy, which breaks the coupling of the VMware proxy and its jobs. This feature is supported on clients running on mixed operating systems as well as a mixture of physical and virtual machines.


	NOTE: The jobs of the VMware proxy from NetVault release 12.0 do not distribute to VMware proxies from NetVault 12.1 or later when they do not have vCenter credentials. Likewise, jobs of the VMware proxy from Plug‑in for VMware 12.0 do not distribute to other VMware proxies from Plug‑in for VMware 12.0 if the server is running NetVault Backup 12.1 or later, regardless of vCenter credentials.