vCloud Director

Feature

Description

Additional information

Agentless backups and restores

A VSA proxy manages backup and restore operations for guest VMs in your environment, eliminating the need to install agents on guest VMs.

You can perform streaming backups for vCloud. IntelliSnap backup operations and backup copy operations are not supported.

Deployment

"Incremental forever" data protection

After an initial full backup, you can perform ongoing incremental backups to capture changes for the source VM.

Backups

Simplified management interface

Administration of virtual machine protection uses smart defaults to reduce configuration and support self service options for end users and groups.

Command Center

Single administration point

The virtualization client serves as a single point of administration for a vCloud Director deployment. From the virtualization client, you can perform all administration activities, such as backups, restores, schedules, and reports.

To perform backup operations, each virtualization client can include multiple proxies where the Virtual Server Agent is installed. The virtualization client also enables proxy teaming, enabling proxy failovers for fault tolerant backups. Using multiple proxies for each virtualization client makes it possible to perform backups for a large number of virtual machines in a limited backup window.

Creating a Virtualization Client

Automatic protection for all virtual machines

Once you configure a virtualization client, all virtual machines in the vCloud Director deployment are automatically selected for backup. This behavior is designed to ensure all virtual machines are backed up.

Creating a Subclient

Customized discovery

To back up only specific virtual machines, you can define rules to discover virtual machines and automatically select them for backup. This is useful in environments where virtual machines are frequently added or removed.

You can identify VMs to be protected for an organization, for a virtual datacenter, or for vApps. You can also identify specific VMs.

Automatic Discovery and Filtering

Customized filters

You can add filters to exclude specific virtual machines from backups. By combining discovery rules and filters, you can precisely target virtual machines for backup.

Defining Filters

Detailed status for each virtual machine backup

You can view detailed information about each backed up virtual machine on the Virtual Machine Status tab of the View Job Details dialog box. This dialog box is available from the CommCell Console when a backup job is running. It displays information such as the name of the proxy that performed the backup of the virtual machine, the size of the backup data, and the type of backup.

Viewing Virtual Machine Backup Status

Feature

Description

Additional information

Block-level deduplication

Deduplication enables more efficient backups by identifying and eliminating duplicate items in data protection operations.

Deduplication at the data block level compares blocks of data against each other. If a virtual machine contains blocks of data that are identical to each other, block level deduplication eliminates storage of redundant data and reduces the size of the data in storage. Deduplication dramatically reduces virtual machine backup data for copies on all media.

Changed Block Tracking (CBT) is a VMware feature that can be used to optimize backups of virtual machines by reading only the allocated and modified portions of a virtual disk. CBT is automatically enabled for virtual machines running on hardware version 7 or later.

Deduplication Overview

Built-in compression

Commvault storage policies automatically enable compression to reduce the quantity of data sent to storage.

Data Compression

Data Compression for VSA