About backup proxy for VMware
Enterprise Workloads Editions: 
Business Enterprise Elite
Business Enterprise Elite
Backup proxy is the key component that sits between your data center and Druva Cloud and is responsible for performing backup and restore of virtual machines.
The following are some key points that can help you to understand the purpose of a backup proxy:
- To protect your virtual machines, you have to deploy the Druva backup proxy in your data center. The backup proxy then registers your server and discovers all virtual machines in the data center.
- Backup proxy is a client-side component and is installed either on VMware ESXi Hypervisor or ESXi Host managed through vCenter Server.
- After deploying a backup proxy, you must register it with Druva.
- The backup proxy performs a backup of virtual machines, based on the backup schedule, by creating recovery points of the virtual machines and sending these recovery points to the assigned storage.
- The backup proxy also supports application-aware data protection of MS-SQL server.
Transport modes
Druva backup proxy can access virtual machine data from datastores using three different methods – NBD, HotAdd, NBDSSL. These methods are referred to as VMware Transport modes.
| Transport mode | Description |
|---|---|
|
NBD |
In this mode, the ESX/ESXi host reads data from storage and sends it across a network to the backup proxy. With NBD transport, large virtual disks can take a long time to transmit as the data is transferred over the network to the backup proxy. |
| NBDSSL | NBDSSL is similar to NBD transport mode, but uses SSL to encrypt all data passed over the TCP connection. |
| HotAdd | This mode takes advantage of the SCSI Hot-Add capability of the ESX/ESXi server to mount the VMDKs of a Virtual Machine, which are being backed up to the backup proxy. The data is read directly from the mounted disks directly for the backup. Backups using the HotAdd mode are faster compared to NBD or NBDSSL as it does not require data transfer over the network from the storage to the backup proxy. |
Next steps