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Backups for VMware IntelliSnap

You can run full, incremental, differential, or synthetic full backups for VMware IntelliSnap.

What Gets Backed Up

You can back up the following entities:

  • Virtual machines (Windows and Linux, powered on or powered off)

  • VMDK files

  • Physical and virtual RDMs hosted on ESXi 5.5 or later.

    For more information, see Include RDMs and Independent Disks in IntelliSnap Backup Operations.

  • VM templates (using HotAdd, NAS, NBD or NBDSSL transport modes)

  • Independent disks

  • Virtual machines residing on Virtual Volume (VVol) or Virtual SAN (VSAN) storage

  • VM Custom Attributes configured in the vSphere Web client for vCenter

  • VM vApp Options configured in the vSphere Web client for vCenter

  • Fault tolerant virtual machines that meet the following requirements:

    • Configured as fault tolerant in the vSphere Web client

    • Hosted on ESXi 6.x or later

    • VM hardware version 11 or later

What Does Not Get Backed Up

The following entities will not be backed up:

  • Virtual machines containing SCSI adapters that are configured for bus sharing (physical or virtual)

  • Virtual machines configured with fault tolerance (prior to ESX 6.x or hardware version 11)

  • Virtual machines that have disks in datastores residing on storage arrays from different vendors. For example: A virtual machine has disks in datastore 1 and datastore 2. Datastore 1 is residing on a NetApp storage array and datastore 2 is residing on a LSI storage array.

  • Virtual machines with disks on local datastores

  • Virtual machines with no disks attached

  • VMDKs in the same location with same names, where only case is different

  • VM templates (using SAN transport mode)

  • Physical and virtual RDMs (prior to ESXi 5.5).

  • Disks using the multi-writer option (install an in-guest agent on the VM to protect data on multi-writer disks)

  • vSphere tags on virtual machines

    Note

    vSphere tags are only backed up and restored for streaming backups. IntelliSnap backups do not preserve vSphere tags.

General Backup Considerations

  • If a virtual machine includes physical RDMs, the backup includes a hardware snapshot of the RDM LUNs and datastore LUNs. VMware snapshots are taken for independent disks.

  • Metadata collection using the Enable Granular Recovery option is not supported for IntelliSnap backups of Linux virtual machines. To recover files and folders from IntelliSnap backups of Linux virtual machines, use Live File Recovery.

  • Backup or restore can fail if the name of the datastore, cluster, or virtual machine contains any of the following characters: 

        +   &   @   %   =   #   %   *   $   #   !   \   /   :   *   ?   "   <   >   |   ;   '

    For more information, see Error downloading or uploading virtual machine configuration file.

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