Hello everybody,
If you've read my last post, you should now have a freshly deployed instance of VMcom Backup Appliance.
Today, we're going to perform the initial settings and create our first backup. It should take no more than a pleasant couple of minutes. We're also going to get familiar with a very pretty, user-friendly web GUI.
Navigate your browser to the appliance's IP address or hostname and log in as admin with password pleasechangeme (unless you've already changed it to something more secure). You should see VMcom's Dashboard.
The dark gray left menu navigates you though all of the functions. Still on the Dashboard, please note the four gray rectangles - they represent vital components of the application and will turn red in case there is something wrong. Also, you'll notice a short info bar giving you some useful hints about the application. At this point, it's telling you to add your VMware infrastructure, which is what we'll do right now.
Step 1: Add your vCenter or ESXi hosts
Click Manage infrastructure under the first gray rectagle or the corresponding left menu item. You will be directed to VMware Infrastructure screen where you can add your vSphere components. It is recommended to create a separate vSphere user for the appliance (check the VMcom Admin Guide for a list of required privileges). Please note that ESXi free is not supported as a backup source and you'll get an error if you try to add one. This is common for almost every backup application out there and can be one of the main reasons to upgrade your VMware license.
Click save and the application will scan the vSphere inventory and cache its contents for faster browsing. The cache refreshes automatically every 20 minutes or after a successful restore operation.
Step 2: Add some storage for your backups
With VMcom, you can utilize local disks or iSCSI/FC/NFS datastores for storing backups. If this is the case, simply edit VMcom VM's settings and create a virtual disk on a corresponding datastore. Back in the VMcom GUI, click Backup Storage and turn such disks into deduplicated backup repositories by clicking the Create button.
If you plan to utilize a NFS/SMB storage or an external deduplication solution (HPE StoreOnce or similar) use one of the Add NFS Share or Add SMB Share buttons and fill in its connection details. The result should look something like this:
Step 3: Create a Backup job
We are now ready to create a Backup job. Select the Backup Jobs left menu item and then Create vSphere Job. When creating the job, you need to decide whether to use VMware's quiescing function when creating snapshots for your backups. It is generally recommended for Windows VMs which can utilize VSS for application-consistent backups. Linux VMs usually ignore quiescing.
Personally, I disable quiescing for IO intensive VMs as it might cause the snapshot creating take longer than usual.
When finished, click Save. The Job will then appear in the list and you can expand its detailed setting by clicking the Open button in the Actions column.
Now it is time to select vSphere objects, that will be protected by this Job. Click the blue plus button in Selected Objects panel. Now you can browse your vSphere inventory and select any object you like - datacenter, cluster, host, folder, resource pool or VM. You can even select multiple objects if you like. When ready, click Save and check the list of Protected VMs.
Next, select a Target Storage for this backup. It will be one of the repositories created in step 2.
That's it. You can now schedule the Job to run periodically or simply run it manually. The scheduler is self-explanatory, so for simplicity let us simply click Run now and see the result.
Simple, right? Next time, we'll go through browsing backups and restoring. Thanks for reading!