Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Agent for ESX/ESXi (Virtual Appliance): Reducing Backup Time in VMware ESX Cluster Environment

Deploy Acronis Agent for ESX/ESXi to each host instead of deploying one to the cluster

This article applies to:

• Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Server Virtual Edition - Acronis Agent for ESX/ESXi (Virtual Appliance)

Description

Backup of all virtual machines of a cluster with a single Acronis Agent for ESX/ESXi (Virtual Appliance) may take a significant amount of time. If length of the backup window is important, use the following workaround:

1. Deploy the Acronis Agent for ESX/ESXi to each clustered host instead of deploying a single agent to the cluster. You can do so from the Acronis Management Server. Just right-click the Virtual machines item instead of the vCenter group; See also Acronis Backup & Recovery 10: Deploying Agent for ESX/ESXi;
2. If VMware DRS is enabled in the cluster, disable automatic migration of the Acronis Agent for ESX/ESXi Virtual Appliances. You also should not migrate them manually to different hosts to avoid the situation when an Acronis Agent for ESX/ESXi manages a host other than its own. The backup and recovery performance will considerably degrade in that case;
3. Create a dynamic group of virtual machines hosted on the clustered hosts. Use the Host/VA criterion for the group;
4. Create a backup policy and apply the policy to the dynamic group. Once a virtual machine migrates to a different host, the Acronis Management Server will deploy a backup task for this machine to the Acronis Agent that manages that host.

Such configuration enables simultaneous backup of virtual machines hosted on different hosts to reduce the backup speed.

(!) This approach has the following limitations:

• It is not recommended to use the Back up now scheme because a machine backup will start every time the machine moves to a different host. Use the Back up later scheme to create a backup plan or policy with manual start;
• Every time a machine moves to a different host, the Acronis Management Server logs show errors similar to the following:

  Cannot revoke the policy because it was not deployed to the machine
  Failed to process the synchronization data received from Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Management Server
  Managed entity '564DF96E-F3A5-0360-336F-EA6CA0F3399C' cannot be found

More information

See also Acronis Backup & Recovery 10: Deploying Agent for ESX/ESXi.