Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer)

The Virtual Server Agent (VSA) provides a unified protection and recovery vehicle for all virtual machine (VM) data in your enterprise. The VSA is installed on a dedicated virtual machine on a XenServer, enabling the VM to serve as a VSA proxy that backs up and restores virtual machine data for a Xen pool or a standalone XenServer. A Xen virtualization client manages all VSA proxies and all data protection operations for a Xen pool. Multiple virtualization clients can be configured to manage different Xen pools.

Key Features

Feature

Description

Additional information

Agentless backups and restores

Install the Virtual Server Agent on a Xen VM to act as a VSA proxy. A VSA proxy manages backup and restore operations for guest VMs in your environment, eliminating the need to install agents on guest VMs.

Deployment Planning

System Requirements

"Incremental forever" data protection

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

Backups

Restores

You can restore full virtual machines or guest files and folders.

Restores

Advanced administration

The CommCell Console provides advanced options for Commvault operations.

Using the CommCell Console, you can configure a virtualization client that serves as a single point of administration. You can perform backups and restores from the virtualization client, and perform other administrative tasks such as creating schedules and generating reports.

Creating a Virtualization Client

Automatic protection for all virtual machines

By default, all virtual machines are automatically selected for backup, to ensure that all virtual machines are backed up.

Subclient Configuration

Automatic discovery

To back up categories of virtual machines, you can create rules to automatically select virtual machines based on specific criteria. Automatic discovery is useful in environments where virtual machines are frequently added or removed.

Adding Subclient Content

Customized filters

To exclude virtual machines from backups, create rules to filter virtual machines.

Defining Filters

Report

You can view detailed information about each backed up virtual machine, including information such as size of the data, the guest operating system, and the host on which the virtual machine is running.

Reports for Virtual Server Agents

Commvault Platform Features

The following features are available throughout Commvault and are not limited to the Virtual Server Agent.

Feature

Description

Additional information

Policy-driven data protection

Policies drive operations to meet service level agreements (SLAs).

Schedule Policies

Storage Policies

Subclient Policies

Monitoring Policies

Block-level deduplication

Block-level deduplication compares blocks of data during backups. If virtual machines contain identical blocks of data, block-level deduplication eliminates the storage of redundant data and reduces the size of data in storage.

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

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