Hello Guys,
This post guides us through How to create a VMware Application Protection policy to back up the SharePoint Application in a Virtual Machine.
On the NetBackup Master Server
NetBackup Management > Right Click on Policies > Select New. Provide a name to the policy.
This would open up an “Add New Policy Window” dialog.
Choose Policy Type as VMware.
Select a Storage unit
NOTE – Enable Granular Recovery is disabled, as this type of policy is by default granular.
Add a new schedule as per your requirement.
IMPORTANT- Clients Tab
For VMware application aware backups, the name of the client cannot be entered manually or chosen from list of clients. It must be chosen using a VMware Intelligent Policy (VIP) query.
We get a query generation dialog. In this dialog you can create a query that searches for VMs, in the above screen we are trying to search for VMs whose display name equals “vmwinapp1”.
To validate the query click on “Test Query” button. We would see the query results in a dialog as shown below. If the result does not match your expectations, modify the query to get desired results.
Now click on the VMware Tab.
Check Enable file recovery from VMbackup.
Uncheck Enable block-level incremental backup. This option must be disabled for VMware backups that protect SharePoint Server.
Check Enable SharePoint Recovery.
This option enables recovery of the SharePoint databases or individual objects from the virtual machine backups. If this option is disabled, you can recover the entire virtual machine from the backup, but you cannot recover the SharePoint databases or objects individually. If uncheck, this would just be a VM backup and not a SharePoint aware VM backup.
Primary VM identifier - This setting specifies the type of name by which NetBackup recognizes virtual machines when it selects them for backup. The network host name for the virtual machine. (This option is the default.) NetBackup obtains the host name by means of a reverse lookup on the virtual machine's IP address. If no host name can be found, the IP address is used as the host name.
Transport modes - The transport modes determine how the snapshot data travels from the VMware datastore to the VMware backup host. The appropriate mode depends in part on the type of network that connects the VMware datastore to the VMware backup host. By default, all modes are selected. NetBackup tries each transport mode in order, from top to bottom. It uses the first mode that succeeds for all disks in the virtual machine.
Important point to note here is that unlike the Exchange and SQL options, there is no log truncation option for SharePoint VMware backups; manual log truncation is normally not required in SharePoint installations. This is usually managed by SQL server engine which acts as backend in SharePoint.
Click OK to save the policy. You will be presented with a warning box that reminds us that we need to enter SharePoint administrator credentials in host properties for the clients.
We are done with the Application aware VM policy for SharePoint backups.