Home > Data Protection > PowerProtect Data Manager > Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Deployment Best Practices > Add asset sources
In PowerProtect Data Manager, assets are the basic units that PowerProtect Data Manager protects. Asset sources are the mechanism that PowerProtect Data Manager uses to manage assets and communicate with the storage system where backup copies of the assets are stored.
Asset sources can be a vCenter Server, Kubernetes cluster, application host, or SMIS server. Assets can be Virtual Machines, Exchange databases, SQL databases, Oracle databases, SAP HANA databases, File systems, Kubernetes namespaces, or Storage Groups.
An asset source, such as a vCenter Server, must be enabled in PowerProtect Data Manager before you can add and register the asset source for the protection of assets.
Follow these steps to add a vCenter Server as an asset source in the PowerProtect Data Manager UI:
The initial vCenter Server discovery identifies all VMware ESXi clusters, hosts, and virtual machines within the vCenter Server. Subsequent discoveries are performed automatically according to a fixed interval to identify any additional or changed VMware entities since the last discovery operation. You can also manually initiate a discovery of VMware entities at any time from the vCenter tab of the Asset Sources window by selecting a vCenter Server and clicking Discover.
After the vCenter virtual machine assets are discovered, you can add a VM Direct appliance to facilitate data movement and then create virtual machine protection policies to back up these assets.
In addition to vCenter Server asset sources, PowerProtect Data Manager provides the option to enable the following asset sources to protect application assets.
Note: This white paper does not provide instructions for each application agent. For links to the individual application agent user guides, see User permission requirements for supported platforms.
Select Infrastructure > Asset Sources > Enable Source.