Best Practices for Agentless VMware Backup with NetApp Storage Systems

Review the following best practice tips before protecting the Catalogic DPX Agentless Backup to protect your VMware VMs with the NetApp Storage systems:

• Use NetApp inline data compression with great caution as inline data compression can slow down backups and impact performance of the NetApp storage system. Avoid compressing a data that is not easily compressible. Offline or scheduled compression is preferred and will yield similar benefits over time.

• Backup snapshots that are made with Agentless VMware Backup can be protected by defining an NDMP backup job to back up the $LATEST agentless snapshot. See Defining DPX a NDMP Backup of the Latest Snapshot for 7-Mode in the Reference Guide.

• By default, completion of a backup with Agentless VMware Backup automatically triggers a NetApp deduplication operation, unless one of the following conditions exist:

  • The command line argument --disable_agentless_dedup has been activated within the SSSVH module launch script in Catalogic DPX.

  • Deduplication is explicitly disabled on the NetApp destination storage volume. Consult your NetApp documentation or NetApp administrator for information on how to facilitate this.

• Use the NetApp data compression judiciously, since data compression can slow down backups and impact performance of the NetApp storage system. Avoid compressing a volume with data that is not easily compressible.