What does Druva back up from VMware?
Druva performs an Image-level backup for the complete VM that includes GuestOS and Data on the VM. Druva performs agent-less backup with the help of a backup appliance known as backup proxy.
You can protect:
VMs on Standalone VMware ESXi (ESXi) host.
VMs on VMware ESXi hosts that are managed through VMware vCenter Server (vCenter Server).
VMware on premise and VMware on Cloud (VMC).
View the supported versions of VMware ESXi and VMware vCenter Server supported by Druva.
You can perform the following backups:
Full backup
Application-aware backup. Currently, Druva supports SQL Server application-aware backups.
You can instantly restore virtual machines that are mapped to Linux CloudCache.
You can exclude a virtual disk - VMDK from VMware backups.
What VCenter/ESXi versions are supported by Druva?
Review the supported versions of VMware ESXi and VMware vCenter Server supported by Druva.
What are the key features provided by Druva for protecting VMware virtual machines?
Druva provides you the capability to back up and restore virtual machine images, files and folders, and application data. The following are the key features that Druva provides:
Agentless data protection of files, disks, or VMs in the cloud, from on-premises, or from the cloud.
Automated storage management with built-in cloud archiving with global deduplication
On-demand scale
vSAN certified
Intuitive and quick deployment
Backup proxy load-balancing
Auto discover virtual machines for backup configuration
App aware backups (Druva supports MS SQL Server aware backups only at the moment)
Instantly restore virtual machines mapped to Linux CloudCache
Backup & DR with ransomware protection
Orchestrate recovery within customer sandbox
What are the prerequisites to back up VMware virtual machines?
Choose between VMware ESXi or vCenter Server for virtual machine protection.
Confirm supported versions of VMware ESXi and VMware vCenter Server, SQL application versions for Application-aware backups, OS and File System, Disks, partitions and, files for File Level Restore, Volume types supported for Dynamic GPT, and vSAN versions.
Assess vCenter and ESXi backup and restore privileges.
View the ports and communication protocols used for VMware virtual machines.
Verify sufficient resources for installing backup proxy.
Review the benefits of enabling Change Block Tracking and VM Tools Quiescing.
What are the recommended resource requirements for proxy deployment?
Review the recommended resource requirements for the backup proxy, including CPU, memory, and available free space on the VMware datastore.
What are the prerequisites to confirm if the environment is ready for Druva deployment?
You need to ensure the required ports are open.
Ensure *.druva.com URL is whitelisted and verify connectivity between the backup proxy and Cloud.
Check the Druva executables are excluded from Antivirus.
Set the Firewall rules and ensure *.druva.com URL is whitelisted to allow connectivity.
What user privileges are supported to back up and restore virtual machines on vCenter and ESXi?
To perform VM backups and restores, you must set the required privileges. The user permissions can be viewed on the VMware vSphere Web Client. For more information, see vSphere Permissions and User Management Tasks and Managing Permissions for vCenter Components.
What ports are used for communication between Druva and other VMware components?
Review the list of ports required for communication between Druva and various VMware components.
What Druva agent applications, configuration paths, and URLs should be allowed?
It is highly recommended to add exclusions for Enterprise Workloads agent application and configuration paths.
If a firewall is configured in your environment, ensure that these patterns are allowed for seamless backups and restores.