The Microsoft application agent provides the capability to onboard existing stand-alone deployments, including their existing backups, to Data Manager. Existing backups are Microsoft application agent backups that are performed before you integrate the Microsoft application agent with the Data Manager software. They are also performed before you add an asset to a Data Manager protection policy. Note the following information regarding existing backups:
- Onboarding of Exchange backup copies to Data Manager is supported only from backups performed with Microsoft application agent version 4.7 and later.
- You can onboard up to three previous months’ worth of existing backups.
- Retention lock is not supported for discovered existing backups in Data Manager.
- Onboarding of DD Boost-over-FC backups is not supported.
With the onboarding capability, Data Manager provides the following centralized features:
- Visibility of both existing backups and any new self-service or Data Manager policy-driven backups of onboarded assets.
- Automatic configuration of target protection storage based on the Data Manager protection policies that are used for your database.
- All other functionality that is provided for Data Manager protection policies.
- Ability to create a storage unit (when creating a protection policy) on the specified DD system backup host that is managed by Data Manager. All subsequent backups of assets in that protection policy go to this new storage unit. This implementation takes the storage-unit information that is provided before you onboard triggering backups through scripts and overrides it with the storage-unit information that is provided by Data Manager.