Direct Engine is deployed in the vSphere environment to perform virtual machine snapshot backups. It improves performance and reduces network bandwidth utilization by using PowerProtect DD source-side deduplication.

Internal VM Direct Protection Engine

• For small scale environments
• Does not require concurrent backups
• Uses Network Block Device transport mode
• Data is transferred over network to ESXi server hosting the proxy
• Proxy gets data from its ESXi host and writes to storage

External VM Direct Protection Engine

• For larger scale environments
• Requires concurrent data protection operations
• Can also use NDB but preferred method is to use HotAdd transport mode for better performance
• Proxy attaches itself to virtual machine disk snapshot to be backed-up
• Proxy reads data from attached disk and writes to storage

Administrators can go to Infrastructure > Protection Engines to open the protection engines window to view statistics for the virtual machine proxy engine, manage and monitor virtual machine proxies, and add an external VM Direct Engine to facilitate data movement.

Note: When an additional VM Direct Engine is deployed and registered, Data Manager uses this appliance instead of the embedded VM Direct Engine. If an additional VM Direct Engine is not available, the embedded VM Direct Engine is used to ensure that backups are completed successfully.