The IBM Spectrum® Protect
Plus solution is provided as
a virtual appliance that includes storage and data movement components.
Sizing component requirements: Some environments might require more
instances of these components to support greater workloads. For guidance about sizing, building, and
integrating components in your IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus
environment, see the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Blueprints.
The following are the base components of IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus:
IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus server
This component manages the entire system. The server consists of several catalogs that track
various system aspects such as restore points, configuration, permissions, and customizations.
Typically, there is one IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus server in a
deployment, even if the deployment is spread across multiple locations.
Site
This component is an IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus policy
construct that is used to manage data placement in the environment. A site can be physical, such as
a data center, or logical, such as a department or organization. IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus components are assigned to sites to localize and
optimize data paths. A deployment always has at least one site per physical location. The placement
of backup data to a site is governed by service level agreement (SLA) policies.
If you are using a vSnap server as your primary backup storage location, the
preferred method is to localize data movement to sites by placing vSnap servers and VADP proxies
together at a single site.
vSnap server
This component is a pool of disk storage that receives data from production systems for data
protection or reuse. The vSnap server consists of one or more disks and can be scaled up (by adding
disks to increase capacity) or scaled out (by introducing multiple vSnap servers to improve overall
performance).
The vSnap server is the required primary backup storage location for most, but not all, workload
types in IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus. For information about
available primary backup storage by workload type, see Managing backup storage.
In larger enterprise environments that use the vSnap server as the primary backup storage
location, additional vSnap servers might be required. Each site can include one or more vSnap
servers.
vSnap pool
This component is the logical organization of disks into a pool of storage space, which is used
by the vSnap server component. This component is also referred to as a storage pool.
VADP proxy
This component is responsible for moving data from vSphere data stores to provide protection for
VMware virtual machines and is required only for protection of VMware resources. Each site can
include one or more VADP proxies.
User interfaces
IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus provides the following interfaces
for configuration, administrative, and monitoring tasks:
IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus user interface
The IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus user interface is the primary
interface for configuring, administering, and monitoring data protection operations.
A key component of the interface is the dashboard, which provides summary information about the
health of your environment. For more information about the dashboard, see Product dashboard.
The menu bar in the user interface contains the following items:
Item
Description
IBM Spectrum
Protect icon
This icon opens IBM Spectrum Protect
Operations Center to provide
expanded data protection. This icon is active only when the URL is entered in the IBM
Spectrum Protect Operations Center URL preference field on the Global
Preferences page. For information about this preference, see Configuring global preferences.
Alerts icon
This icon opens the Alerts window. For more information about alerts,
see Alerts.
Help icon
This icon opens the online help system.
User menu
This menu shows the name of the user who is logged on. The menu provides access to product
information and what's new, quick start, and API documentation. You can also use this menu to
complete tasks such as accessing logs and testing connections between IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus and nodes.
If you are logged on to IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus as the
superuser, you also use this menu to manage Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates and the
product license.
The IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus superuser is the user who is
assigned the SUPERUSER role. There is only one IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus superuser. For more information about the
superuser, see Managing the superuser account.
Depending on the browser window size, the navigation panel might push the
main panel to the side for larger browser window sizes. For smaller browser window sizes, the
navigation pane might overlap the main pane. You can click the collapse icon to collapse the
navigation pane.
Restriction: The IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus product does not follow International Components
for Unicode (ICU) collation sorting for menus. Therefore, menus appear in code point order. In some
languages, letters are sorted differently from code point order. As such, the sorted order of
characters and words as they appear in menus when using these languages will appear out of expected
order.
vSnap command-line interface
The vSnap command-line interface is a secondary interface for administering some data protection
tasks. Run the vsnap command to access the command-line interface. The command
can be invoked by the user ID serveradmin or any other operating system user
who has vSnap administrator privileges.
Administrative console
The administrative console is available when IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus is installed as a virtual appliance. The
administrative console is used to complete administrative tasks such as updating, starting and
stopping IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus, resetting the credentials for
the superuser account, changing the time zone for the application, and configuring network
settings.
To log on to the administrative console, you can use the IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus superuser account or the
serveradmin user. The serveradmin user is used only to
access the administrative console and the IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus virtual appliance and is required in the following situations:
To log on to the IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus virtual appliance
operating system when working with IBM® Support.
To log on to the administrative console to complete tasks such a resetting the credentials for
the superuser account. For example, when the password for the superuser account is lost.
You cannot use the serveradmin user to log on to the IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus.
Example VMware deployment
The following figure shows IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus deployed in two active locations. Each
location has inventory that requires protection. Location 1 has a vCenter server and two vSphere
datacenters (and an inventory of virtual machines) and Location 2 has a single datacenter (and a
smaller inventory of virtual machines).
The IBM Spectrum Protect
Plus server is deployed in only one
of the sites. VADP proxies and vSnap servers (with their corresponding disks) are deployed in each
site to localize data movement in the context of the protected vSphere resources.
Bidirectional replication is configured to take place between the vSnap servers at the two
sites.