VMware servers

To offer an enhanced solution, standalone Cove Data Protection (Cove) replaced Backup and Recovery. Where Backup and Recovery has been enabled and continues to be so for devices, the options presented here are still available.

If Backup and Recovery options are not present in your N-sight RMM, you need to use Cove.

To start a 30-day free trial of Cove, click the app switcher in the Product Bar, and select Cove Data Protection (Cove).

Backup & Recovery 2014 is cluster-aware for VMware

Backup Manager offers backup and recovery service for VMware vSphere (ESXi) virtual machines. This is achieved by creating an identical virtual machine with the same operating system, hardware device settings (drivers for modems, network adapters, printers, etc.), the same documents etc. The machine is created automatically at the specified location (on the same server as the original machine or on a different device).

Up to nine virtual machines can be backed up per Backup Manager

VMware restores must be performed one disk at a time

Supported operating systems

VMware Backup and Recovery is available on Windows devices. Here is the list of supported Windows versions:

Supported ESXi versions

The following ESXi versions are officially supported:

  • 6.0

  • 6.5 (requires Backup Manager 17.4 or later). In the Recovery Console, this target is available only to those backup devices that are running Backup Manager 17.3 or later.

When a version of a third-party product reaches End of Life, we will endeavor to provide best effort support. However, if versions which are no longer supported by their company begin to fail, the assistance our Support Teams can provide is limited.

Limitations

We cannot support backup for:

  • Templates

  • vApps

Recommended pre-backup settings

Before starting a backup, we would suggest enabling Changed Block Tracking (CBT) on your virtual machines. We have found this to be a highly effective feature that reduces the duration of subsequent backups.

The CBT feature does not influence statistics when reporting the size of processed or transferred files.

Additional information and instructions on this feature are available in the VMware Knowledge Base article Changed Block Tracking (CBT) on virtual machines (1020128).

Please be aware that we are not responsible for the content of external sites.

Backup options

You can opt to backup the whole server (its configuration will not be backed up), a particular virtual machine or one of its disks.

To take an application aware VMware (ESX and ESXi) backup:

ESXi is supported provided it is licensed (as this exposes the API used to take the snapshot). If ESXi is not licensed, then the snapshots will fail after the 30 day trial period.

  1. Open the Backup Manager
  2. Navigate to the Backup tab
  3. Click Add against VMware
  4. In Selection VMware click Add
  5. Enter the sever information:
    • Server (hostname or IP Address)
    • Server port
    • Username
    • Password
  6. Save to apply
  7. The Backup Manager connects to the VMware server to verify the credentials. Where successfully go to the Backup tab
  8. in the VMware section expand the VMware virtual machines node and select the virtual machines to backup.

    9. Please note, in Backup & Recovery 2014 it may be necessary to click the Network Share name to display the node structure.

  9. When you edit your backup selection for VMware, you can enable Log Truncation for MS SQL and MS Exchange through:
    1. Manage Logs > Enable log truncation
    2. Enter your credentials
  10. Set the VMware backup Schedule
  11. Re-configure the Backup & Recovery Check to take account of the increased backup jobs

To amend the selected data sources:

  1. Open the Backup Manager
  2. Go to the Backup tab
  3. Click Edit
  4. Expand the target node and change the selection
  5. Save

MS SQL and MS Exchange Log Truncation - Additional Information

Log truncation automatically frees space in the logical log for reuse by the transaction log and where enabled on VMware machine running MS SQL or MS Exchange, the logs are truncated only after the successfully completion of the backup sessions.

Log truncation is available for:

Guest Systems VMware Versions MS Exchange Versions MS SQL Versions
Windows Server 2008 and later (US English versions) 5.1, 5.5, and 6.0 2008 and later 2005 and later

Before enabling log truncation, please ensure the following conditions are met:

  •    The target virtual machine has VMware and PowerShell Tools installed.
  •    The target virtual machine is started.
  •    VMware Tools are running.