VMware Cloud Director

Agentless backups and restores

Install the Virtual Server Agent on a machine 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

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

Changed Block Tracking

Changed Block Tracking (CBT) is a VMware feature that can be used to optimize backups of virtual machines by reading only the allocated and modified portions of a virtual disk. CBT is automatically enabled for virtual machines running on hardware version 7 or later.

Simplified operational interface

The web-based Command Center interface uses smart defaults to simplify configuration and support streamlined operations.

Command Center

Single administration point

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 for a VMware Cloud Director deployment. 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 in the VMware Cloud Director deployment are automatically selected for backup, to ensure all virtual machines are backed up.

Creating a Subclient

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.

Automatic Discovery and Filtering

Customized filters

To exclude virtual machines from the backup, create rules to filter virtual machines.

Defining Filters

Detailed status for each virtual machine backup

You can view detailed information about each backed up virtual machine, including information such as the name of the proxy that performed the backup of the virtual machine, the size of the backup data, and the type of backup.

Viewing Virtual Machine Backup Status

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