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Install Agent for Windows or Agent for Linux on each virtual machine. Register the machines on
the management server. The machines will be considered as physical machines. You can apply a
backup policy to these machines or create a backup plan on each machine separately. If any of
the machines meets membership criteria set for a dynamic group of physical machines, the
machine will be protected by the policy applied to this group.
Advanced product editions other than Virtual Edition (Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced
Server, Advanced Server SBS Edition and Advanced Workstation) allow using only the last of the
above methods.
2.12.3
Grouping the registered machines
As soon as a machine is registered (p. 397) on the management server, the machine appears in the
All machines
built-in group (p. 389). By applying a backup policy to this group, you protect all the
registered machines. The thing is that a single policy may not be satisfactory because of the different
roles of the machines. The backed up data is specific for each department; some data has to be
backed up frequently, other - twice a year; so you may want to create various policies applicable to
different sets of machines. In this case consider creating custom groups.
2.12.4
Policies on machines and groups
This section helps you understand the automatic deployment and revoking policies performed by the
management server when a policy or a number of policies are applied to machines and nested
groups of machines in various combinations; when a policy is revoked from machines and groups;
when a machine or a group is moved from one group to another.
Operations with groups to which backup policies are applied will result in changing the policies on
the member machines. On any hierarchy change, that is, when moving, removing, creating groups;
adding machines to static groups; or when machines enter a group based on dynamic criteria, a huge
number of inheritance changes may occur. Please familiarize yourself with this section to be sure
that your actions yield the desired result and to understand the result of the automated Acronis
Backup & Recovery 10 Management Server operations.
What is applying, deploying and revoking?
Applying
a policy establishes the correspondence between the policy and one or more machines.
This process takes place inside the management server's database and does not take much time.
Deploying
a policy transfers the established correspondence to the machines. Physically, a bundle of
tasks is created on each machine according to the configuration provided by the policy.
Revoking
a policy is the reverse action to the aggregate of applying and deploying. Revoking removes
the correspondence between the policy and one or more machines and then removes the tasks from
the machines.
If a machine is not available or not reachable at the moment, the change will be propagated on the
machine when it becomes available. This means that deploying a policy to multiple machines is not a
momentary action. The same is true for revoking. These two processes may be durable and so the
management server tracks and displays personal statuses for each machine that it works with, as
well as the policy's cumulative status.
