VMware Virtual Machines Protection

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) provides protection for Virtual Machines (VMs) running on the VMware platform. Most of the workflows are identical to how other data sources work within DPM, but there are some differences primarily afforded by richer capabilities provided in the VMware platform. The differences and behaviors that are unique to VMware VMs and assume reader is familiar with general data protection workflows.


VMware VM Protection

DPM uses native vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) provided by VMware and specifically designed to take host-level VM backups. In VMware backup terminology, this is referred to as agentless backup since the backup operations run from the VMware host server without the need for any agents deployed either on the host or in the VM.

DPM can back up VMs that are deployed on standalone ESXi hosts or in a Highly Available (HA) ESXi host cluster in a vCenter environment. DPM leverages vCenter integration to discover virtual machines in a VMware environment.

After the VMware VMs are discovered and added to the protection group, all the backup workflows are identical to other data sources. This provides a seamless experience in the DPM context for protecting VMware virtual machines.


Differences between Hyper-V and VMware VM backup

VMware as a hypervisor platform differs from Hyper-V, which impacts some of the VM protection workflows. The following list highlights these differences:

• Agentless: This is a key difference between the Hyper-V and VMware stack where no agents need to be deployed on the ESXi server to back up the VMs running on the host. With Hyper-V, the DPM server pushes agents on every Hyper-V host before it can discover and protect the VMs running on that host. With VMware, DPM integrates directly with VADP APIs provided by the VMware hypervisor to perform the backups, thereby obviating the need for installing any agents.
• vCenter level discovery: With Hyper-V VM protection, VMs must be selected from each Hyper-V host or a Hyper-V cluster. With VMware, however, all the VMs in the vCenter environment are discoverable, which makes VM protection simple since there is no need to browse through each host to discover and protect the VMs.
• Folder-level discovery: During the discovery step within the DPM protection workflow, either the entire folder or some of the VMs can be selected for protection. Additionally, if the entire folder is selected for protection, any new VMs that are added to the folder are automatically protected by DPM. This feature is available only with VMware VM backup; Hyper-V does not provide folder-level abstraction.

Source: Microsoft System Center DPM VMware Private Cloud Protection