Protect VMware vSphere VMs

Commvault provides protection and recovery for VMware vSphere environments. It integrates with VMware vCenter to enable agentless backups, application-consistent protection, and fast VM or file-level restores. Policy-based automation, deduplication, encryption, and immutability help you protect VMware workloads across on-premises and cloud environments.

What's supported

Platform requirements

• VMware vSphere 9.0–7.x, using a licensed edition

Some transport modes (such as HotAdd) require specific VMware licensing. If HotAdd isn’t available in your vSphere edition, use another transport mode.

You can protect VMs that are hosted on a vCenter or a standalone ESXi host. In Commvault, you configure a hypervisor to represent the vCenter or ESXi host.

Guest VM requirements

• The guest operating system must be supported by VMware VADP.

• For guest-aware features (such as quiesced snapshots, guest file operations, and file exclusions), VMware Tools must be installed and supported by the ESXi host.

Supported resources and data

Commvault supports backups of the following VMware resources:

• VMs, including Windows and Linux VMs, whether powered on or off

• VM templates when you use HotAdd, NAS, NBD, or NBDSSL transport modes

• VMDK files

• Virtual RDMs

• GPT or dynamic disk volumes

• vSphere tags

• VM custom attributes

• VM vApp options

• Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) settings

  DRS settings are included in backups by default and are restored only during in-place full VM restores. The restore operation requires the Host > Modify Cluster permission.

• Fault-tolerant VMs, when all the following conditions are met:

  • The VM is configured as fault tolerant in the vSphere Client

  • The VM uses VM hardware version 11 or later

  • The environment meets the supported vSphere version requirements

Backup and restore capabilities

Backups use VMware snapshots and can use Changed Block Tracking (CBT) for efficient incremental backups.

Transport modes control how backup data is read during backups and restores.

You can restore VMware data in several ways:

• Restore VMware vSphere data: Full VMs, files, or disk files

• Recover and reuse VMware vSphere data: Repave OS disks or attach disks

• Run VMware vSphere VMs from backup: Live recovery or live mount

What isn't supported

Commvault doesn't support the following VMware scenarios:

• The free ESXi license, because it doesn't include the required VMware backup APIs

• VM configurations or components that VMware doesn’t support or that are inaccessible

• Features that require direct ESXi host access in restricted environments (such as some cloud-hosted VMware offerings)

• VMs with SCSI adapters configured for bus sharing (physical or virtual)

• VMs that do not have an attached disk

• VMs replicated by VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

• VM templates when you use SAN transport mode

• High Availability (HA) settings

• Physical RDMs

• Independent disks

• Disks that use the multi-writer option

• Page files and swap files (excluded from backups)