Starting an on-demand backup of a virtual machine

When you start an on-demand backup of a virtual machine (VM), the backup operation begins immediately without waiting for a schedule to run.

Before you begin

You cannot run a backup operation for VMs if you are using any configuration that includes Tivoli® Storage FlashCopy® Manager to back up your data.

About this task

Typically, the VMs in your VMware datacenter are backed up when a schedule is run. However, you might want to start an on-demand backup if you notice that a VM was not backed up recently or if a backup completed with errors. You can also start an on-demand backup of a VM that is excluded from scheduled backup services.

Tip: Any retention policy settings are observed during an on-demand backup. The retention policy for a VM determines how many backup versions of a VM can exist on the Tivoli Storage Manager server. Depending on how many backup versions of a VM can exist on the server, running an on-demand backup of a VM might cause older backups to expire. When backup versions expire on the server, they are removed from server storage. For example, if a VM was backed up four times, and only four backup versions can exist on the server, running an on-demand backup causes the oldest backup version to expire.

To check the number of backup versions that can exist on the server, select a VM in the vSphere Web Client and click Manage > IBM Data Protection.

Procedure

To start an on-demand backup of a VM, complete the following steps:

In the vSphere Web Client, right-click a VM and click Actions > All IBM Data Protection Actions > Back Up.
In the Backup a Virtual Machine window, select a type of backup to run.
- Incremental: Backs up VM data that changed since the last incremental or full backup. If no previous backup exists, a full backup is run.
- Full: Backs up an entire VM regardless of when the last backup occurred.
Select a data mover node to back up the VMs. The data mover node contains the Tivoli Storage Manager backup-archive client that runs the backup operations.
Typically, you can accept the default data mover node. However, to improve workload balancing in some situations, you might select a data mover that is not heavily used.
Click OK to begin the backup operation.
Click All Users' Tasks in the Recent Tasks section of the vSphere Web Client to view the progress of the backup operation in a task view.

Results

After the backup operation is completed, select a VM and click Monitor > IBM Data Protection to view the backup information for the VM.