VMware Backup Overview

VMware Backup is supported for:

• vSphere 6.0 to 9.0

Supported OS:

• Windows 10/11 (Pro, Enterprise)
• Windows Server 2008R2/2012/2012R2/2016/2019/2022/2025

Licensing

A VM Server license is required to back up virtual machines. By default, this license comes with two VM socket licenses included, meaning that you can only back up your virtual machines from a hypervisor that has no more than two physical processors. If your hypervisor incorporates three or more physical processors, acquiring an extra processor socket license will be required for each processor. If your virtual environment has more than 2 sockets, you need to buy additional VM Server Socket licenses to cover your requirements.

These licenses will be assigned as follows: once the backup plan starts for a VM, it checks if there are any sockets that are not covered by VM Server licenses, and if this is the case, VM Socket licenses will be requested from the license pool available to the user / company. If there is a sufficient number of available VM socket licenses, these licenses will be assigned to the VM automatically. If there are no available VM socket licenses, the backup plan fails, and the issue is reported. It is recommended to make sure on the Organization > Licenses page that VM socket licenses are available to the user/company before running the backup plan in question. All VM Socket licenses that are already in use will be shown as assigned.

Considerations

VMware backup in Backup Agent requires properly working name resolution in the LAN. The VMware backup plan saves the FQDN as a unique VMware ESXi host identifier and uses it to check the socket count of the server when creating other plans. For this, the TCP/IP stack of the ESXi host and the name resolution in the LAN (DNS entries or hosts file) must be properly configured by the customer.

If you are planning to change the ESXi host name or host IP, consider the following:

• If you change the ESXi host name, you should change it in all backup plans where you specified the original ESXi host name.
• If you change the host IP, you should change it in all backup plans where you specified the original host IP.

In all changed backup plans, the backup will be continued after the change is done.