Users Guide

• Backing up physical mode RDMs

To include pRDM volumes when using the VMware Virtual Machines backup extension, select the virtual machine congured to use the

pRDM. To include physical RDMs in a backup, select the Create Storage Center Replay of Physical RDMs backup set option.

NOTE: Windows guest virtual machines that store data for VSS aware applications (like SQL Server or Exchange) on

physical RDMs, or iSCSI volumes mapped directly to the guest, may fail to create snapshots when using the VMware

Virtual Machines backup extension. This is a known issue with Windows VSS snapshot integration and VMware snapshot

creation. If a failure occurs, use the vSphere Client to change the value of the disk.EnableUUID parameter to FALSE.

For further instructions, see: HTTP://KB.vmware.com/KB/1031298

• Backing up virtual machine memory

By default, a backup of a VMware virtual machine does not include machine memory. To include a dump of the virtual machine memory

at the time of the backup, use the Include virtual machine memory in vSphere snapshot backup set option. Including machine

memory causes the backup to take more time to complete. For more information, see: HTTP://KB.vmware.com/KB/1007532

Data Recovery for VMware

Replay Manager provides two data recovery actions: Expose and Restore. The VMware backup extension selected for the Replay Manager

job determines which data recovery actions are available.

Expose Action for VMware

The Expose action is supported by both VMware backup extensions. This action presents a View of the exposed Replay back to the

vSphere cluster in order to recover data at either the image or le level.

Although exposing the volume is managed by Replay Manager, the act of data recovery is not. The administrator must manually register the

virtual machine on the View volume and power it on for an image level recovery, or add its .vmdk disk le back to the original (or surrogate)

virtual machine's virtual inventory to perform le level recovery.

Restore Data with VSS Consistency

If data is required to be restored with VSS consistency, take the following steps for each virtual machine being recovered:

1 Register the virtual machine in inventory.

2 From VMware, Revert to Snapshot.

3 From VMware, Delete Snapshot.

Although the Expose action requires some manual steps, it is the fastest way to recover data at both the le and image levels while

maintaining storage eciency and while preserving the data progression history. Experienced users of vSphere and Dell storage should

use the Expose action whenever possible to ensure the fastest recovery and most ecient use of raw storage.

Restore Action for VMware

Instead of exposing the datastore for large scale or rapid image level recovery, the Restore action automatically deletes the existing virtual

machines being restored and then restores the virtual machines individually by using a copy operation from a View volume back to its

original location. The Restore action is only supported by the VMware Virtual Machines backup extension and is fully automated.

Because Restore is a bulk copy operation, available blocks are written to as new according to the storage prole applied to the volume.

Using the Storage Center defaults, the virtual machines are copied into Tier 1 storage regardless of where the blocks existed previously. The

main benet of this method is that it provides automated virtual machine recovery at the expense of storage eciency and Recovery Time

Objective (RTO).

Replay Manager Best Practices