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PowerProtect Data Manager provides software-defined data protection, deduplication, operational agility, self-service and IT governance for physical, virtual, and cloud-based environments. This platform provides centralized governance that helps mitigate risk and assures compliance of SLAs and SLOs through simple protection workflows. It enables automated discovery and onboarding of databases, VMs, integrated storage, self-service, and centralized protection for databases and containers. It also includes a SaaS-based reporting solution for management. PowerProtect Data Manager:
PowerProtect Data Manager protects workloads of VCF on Dell EMC VxRail. The workloads have respective vCenter Servers which are discovered as an asset source once registered with PowerProtect Data Manager. It then discovers the associated assets (VMs) and creates policies for scheduled backup with PLC.
The VM proxy (vProxy) protection engine is the virtual machine data protection component within PowerProtect Data Manager. During backups, the vProxy agent creates a snapshot of virtual-machine data directly from the datastore. The snapshot is moved directly to the target storage where the backups are stored. This process uses VMware vSphere Storage API for Data Protection (VADP) which enables centralized, off-host, LAN-free backup of VCF virtual machines.
The VADP is a subset of the vSphere API that enables backup and restore applications. The snapshot-based VADP framework allows efficient, off-host, centralized backup of virtual-machine storage. After taking a snapshot to quiesce virtual disks, software can offload the backup load to the target storage.
PowerProtect Data Manager supports HotAdd and NBD transport modes, which are the transport modes that you select when adding the vProxy appliance (HotAdd, Network Block Device, or the default setting of HotAdd, Failback to Network Block Device).
In NBD mode, the ESX or ESXi host reads data from storage and sends it across a network to the target storage. As its name implies, this transport mode is not LAN‐free, unlike SAN transport.
HotAdd is a VMware feature that enables devices to be hot-added while a virtual machine is running. Besides SCSI disk, virtual machines can add additional CPUs and memory capacity. If backup software runs in a virtual appliance, it can take a snapshot and create a linked clone of the target virtual machine and attach and read the linked clone’s virtual disks for backup. This involves a SCSI HotAdd on the ESXi host where the target VM and backup proxy are running. Virtual disks of the linked clone are hot added to the backup proxy. The target virtual machine continues to run during backup.
The protection life cycle (PLC) provides central scheduling and manages timing of launching replication jobs per asset. If replication has been configured as a scheduled job, PLC processes the PLC group within the replication window, calling into the replication manager service. If the replication objective does not have a predefined time window, PLC waits for the copy-creation event (successful copy creation) and calls it into the replication manager service. PLC invokes the managed file replication service.