VMware: System Requirements

For VMware support, the VSA is installed on one or more physical computers or virtual machines.

Proxy Computer Requirements

The VSA proxy machine must be one of the following types of machines:

Microsoft Microsoft Windows Server 2019 (Standard, Datacenter) (64-bit only) x64 Editions (Standard, DataCenter, and Core)
Microsoft Windows Server 2016 x64 Editions (Standard, DataCenter, and Core)
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 x64 Editions (Standard, DataCenter, and Core)
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 x64 Editions (Standard, DataCenter, and Core)
For Linux proxy support, use one of the following options:
- Deploy a File Recovery Enabler for Linux (FREL) to serve as a Virtual Server Agent proxy for VMware. For more information, see Configuring a Linux Proxy for VMware.
- Install the Virtual Server Agent on a Linux machine that runs CentOS or RHEL version 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, 7.7, or 8.
  
  Note
  
  To use a machine that runs RHEL 7.7 as a VSA proxy, you must install the pcre-devel-8.32-17.el7.x86_64 package.
  
  For RHEL 8 VMs, to install operating system packages that are required to enable automatic installation of Mono, register the VMs with Red Hat.
  
  For more information, see Deploying a CentOS or RHEL Machine as a VSA Proxy.
- Linux proxy support for VMware is enabled by default for the HyperScale 1.5 Appliance and HyperScale X Appliance. You can select appliance nodes to act as Linux proxies.

Hard Drive

Verify that at least 100 GB free space is available for installing the Virtual Server Agent.

VMware vCloud Director

vCloud Director 5.1.x, 5.5.x, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, 9.5, 9.7, 10.0

Guest Virtual Machine Requirements

Virtual Machine Host	The following versions are supported for vSphere, vCenter, vCenter Server Appliance, and ESX/ESXi: 4.1 or later, 5.0.x, 5.1.x, 5.5, 5.5.1, 5.5.2, 5.5.3, 5.5.6, 6.0, 6.0.1, 6.0.2, 6.0.3, 6.5, 6.7, 7.0 For any ESXi servers, the VADP is not available in the free version of ESXi. The Essentials licensing level or higher is required.
Virtual Machine Hardware Version	4.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, 11.0, 13.0, 14.0, 15.0, 17.0, 18.0, 19.0
Virtual Machine Operating Systems	All Guest Operating Systems supported by VADP
VMware Tools on Virtual Machines	Install the latest version of VMware Tools supported by the host on each virtual machine. At a minimum, the version of VMware tools on virtual machines must also be supported on the host; unsupported versions must be upgraded.

VMware Transport Considerations

Licensing: In vSphere 5.0, the SCSI HotAdd feature is enabled only for vSphere editions Enterprise and higher, which have Hot Add licensing enabled. No separate Hot Add license is available for purchase as an add-on. In vSphere 4.1, Hot Add was also enabled in the Advanced edition. Customers with vSphere Essentials or Standard editions are not able to perform proxy-based backup, which relies on SCSI HotAdd. Those customers must use alternate transport modes.

SCSI Controllers: HotAdd relies on the SCSI protocol. With VDDK 6.5 or later, VMware recommends the paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) controller. (For more information, see Virtual Disk Development Kit Release Notes.) For older VDDK versions, use the LSI SCSI controller. HotAdd does not support IDE disks.

For more information, see System Requirements for Virtual Server Agent with VMware.