Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2010
293
Deploy the agent (p. 294) to the ESX/ESXi server
or
Install and configure the agent manually as described in "Installing ESX/ESXi virtual
appliance"
Add (p. 278) the virtual appliance to the management server as an ordinary physical machine
The virtual machines hosted on the ESX/ESXi server (except for the virtual appliance with the agent)
appear in the
All virtual machines
group.
Virtual machines added to the management server as virtual machines are present under the
Virtual
machines
in the
Navigation
tree. This section describes available operations with these machines.
7.1.4.1
Virtual machines on a management server
Availability of virtual machines
Virtual machines are displayed as available when both the agent is available for the management
server and the machines are available for the agent. The list of virtual machines is refreshed
dynamically every time the management server synchronizes with the agents.
When the virtualization server or the virtual appliance becomes unavailable or is withdrawn, the
virtual machines are grayed out.
When virtual machines become unavailable for the agent (this happens when machines are removed
from the virtualization server inventory, deleted from the disk, or the server's storage is down or
disconnected), the machines disappear from the
All virtual machines
groups and other groups they
are included in. Tasks that back up these virtual machines will fail with an appropriate log record; as a
result, the generative policy will have the Error status.
The online or offline state of a virtual machine does not affect its backup since virtual machines can
be backed up in both states.
Policies for virtual machines
Any policy that backs up disks and volumes can be applied to virtual machines as well as to physical
machines. Policies that perform file-level backup cannot be applied to virtual machines. For more
information about backup and recovery of virtual machines, supported guest operating systems and
disk configurations, see "Backing up virtual machines".
What happens when a policy is applied to a group of virtual machines
Each machine will be backed up by a separate task to a separate archive. The default archive name
will include the virtual machine name and the policy name. It is advisable to keep default archive
naming so that you can easily find each machine's backups in the storage vault.
Grouping of virtual machines
The
Virtual machines
section of the navigation tree contains one built-in group called
All virtual
machines
. You cannot modify this group manually, delete or move it. You can apply policies that back
up disks or volumes to this group.
You can create both static and dynamic groups of virtual machines. Any virtual machine that is
currently available can be added to a static group. You cannot create groups that contain both
physical and virtual machines.
The dynamic membership criteria for virtual machines are as follows: