PowerProtect Data Manager software is a virtual appliance that is deployed on an ESXi host using OVA. PowerProtect Data Manager is integrated with PowerProtect Data Domain Virtual Edition as the protection target where the backups are stored.

The SDDC manager is responsible for performing administration tasks on VCF. It deploys vCenter Servers according to the need of workloads, such as for the management workload (Mgmt WLD), and if required, for the virtual infrastructure workload (VI WLD). The management workloads contain management virtual machines: SDDC Manager, NSX manager, vRealize Automation appliances, vRealize Log Insight Node, and vRealize Proxy agents.  

The vCenter Servers are registered with the PowerProtect Data Manager using FQDN/IP. PowerProtect Data Manager discovers the management workloads and VI workloads as virtual-machine workloads associated to the vCenter as assets. A protection policy enables selecting a specific group of assets that must be backed up. A virtual machine protection policy (PLC) can be created using the PowerProtect Data Manager UI. PowerProtect Data Manager enables users to protect, manage, and recover data on premises. PowerProtect Data Manager software uses Dell EMC Data Domain Virtual Edition (DDVE) for protection storage.

The following figure and steps describe the PowerProtect Data Manager architecture.

Figure 6.   PowerProtect Data Manager architecture

1. The management WLD vCenter is registered with PowerProtect Data Manager. 
2. The external VM proxy (vProxy) is installed on the management WLD vCenter server.

Note: Other vProxies are installed with increasing workloads to load balance. A vProxy is created on a load-basis on PowerProtect Data Manager. The number of vProxies depends on the workload on PowerProtect Data Manager.

 PowerProtect Data Manager creates the external vProxy and pushes it to vCenter Server where it resides on the ESXi host. PowerProtect Data Manager informs vCenter Server to perform a snapshot for the VM, and the vCenter communicates with the ESXi host to perform a snapshot for the VM. Once the snapshots are taken, it creates differential disk. The vProxy protection engine gets the changed blocks from VADP. The virtual flat disk (vmdk) becomes read-only and is mounted on the vProxy VM which is then pushed to the target storage as a backed-up disk. Once the backup process is completed, the snapshots are consolidated, vProxy removes the mounted disk, it is ready for the next backup.  

The following figure and steps describe the protection workflow of VM-consistent backups.

Figure 7.   VM-consistent backups

1. The VM proxy takes a VADP snapshot.
2. The VM proxy gets the changed blocks from VADP.
3. The VM proxy starts the data transfer to the target storage.
4. PowerProtect Data Manager creates a VM Protection Copy Set (PCS) that is based on the backup results.