Using a locally attached storage

You can attach an additional disk to Agent for VMware (Virtual Appliance) so the agent can back up to this locally attached storage. This approach eliminates the network traffic between the agent and the backup location.

A virtual appliance that is running on the same host or cluster with the backed-up virtual machines has direct access to the datastore(s) where the machines reside. This means the appliance can attach the backed-up disks by using the HotAdd transport, and therefore the backup traffic is directed from one local disk to another. If the datastore is connected as Disk/LUN rather than NFS, the backup will be completely LAN-free. In the case of NFS datastore, there will be network traffic between the datastore and the host.

Using a locally attached storage presumes that the agent always backs up the same machines. If multiple agents work within the vSphere, and one or more of them use locally attached storages, you need to manually bind each agent to all machines it has to back up. Otherwise, if the machines are redistributed among the agents by the management server, a machine's backups may be dispersed over multiple storages.

You can add the storage to an already working agent or when deploying the agent from an OVF template.

To attach a storage to an already working agent

  1. In VMware vSphere inventory, right click the Agent for VMware (Virtual Appliance).

  2. Add the disk by editing the settings of the virtual machine. The disk size must be at least 10 GB.

    Be careful when adding an already existing disk. Once the storage is created, all data previously contained on this disk will be lost.

  3. Go to the virtual appliance console. The Create storage link is available at the bottom of the screen. If it is not, click Refresh.
  4. Click the Create storage link, select the disk and specify a label for it. The label length is limited to 16 characters, due to file system restrictions.

To select a locally attached storage as a backup destination

When creating a protection plan, in Where to back up, select Local folders, and then type the letter corresponding to the locally attached storage, for example, D:\.