Overview

The following infographic provides an overview of the process of setting up VMware with Phoenix:

Step 1: Decide what you want to protect

Decide if you want to protect VMs deployed in an on-premise vSphere-based data center, or VMware Cloud (VMC). For VMware Cloud see, Druva Phoenix and VMC integration.

You can protect: 

• VMs on Standalone VMware ESXi (ESXi) host
  If you deploy a backup proxy on a standalone ESXi host environment and register it with standalone credentials, only the virtual machines that are created on that ESXi host will be backed up.
  In this scenario, you will have to install at least one backup proxy for each VMware ESXi hypervisor. 
• VMs on VMware ESXi hosts managed through VMware vCenter Server (vCenter Server)
  If you deploy a backup proxy in a vCenter controlled environment and register it with vCenter credentials,  all the virtual machines, across hypervisors that are associated with the vCenter Server, will be backed up.
  In this scenario, you will have to install at least one backup proxy for every vCenter Server in your virtual environment. However, you can deploy one or many backup proxies on any ESXi host managed by a single vCenter Server.
  Backup proxy on vCenter Server backs up virtual machines created across hosts that are associated with vCenter Server.

Also, review the system requirements to backup virtual machines. 

Step 2: Deploy the first backup proxy and register the VMware setup

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.

For more information, see About Phoenix backup proxy for VMware.

You can register your VMware setup with Druva by deploying the first backup proxy from your local system using the Druva Proxy Deployer utility.

For more information, see Deploy the first backup proxy and register the VMware setup.

Step 3: Configure your virtual machines for backup

Once your VMware setup is registered with Druva, the backup proxy discovers the virtual machines that are available in your VMware environment and lists them in the Hybrid Workloads Management Console. You can then go ahead and configure the virtual machine for backup. 

For more information, see Configure Virtual Machines for Backup.

Step 4: Scale-out by deploying additional proxies

You can scale-out by deploying additional backup proxies directly from the Hybrid Workloads Management Console.

For more information, see Deploy additional backup proxies.

Step 5: Load balance by creating backup proxy pools

To achieve backup proxy load balancing, you can create backup proxy pools.

A backup proxy pool consists of multiple backup proxies. With load balancing, you can ensure that the backups or the RPO is not impacted. Even if one backup proxy goes down the other proxy(s) in the pool can take over.  A backup proxy is a stateless entity.

Apart from load balancing, you can also ensure optimization of backups by defining a virtual machine's affinity to a backup proxy by choosing an appropriate backup proxy for backup. 

For more information, see Create a backup proxy pool.