Getting started with agentless backups

Topic

This article describes system requirements for agentless backups to a Datto appliance.

Environment

  • Datto SIRIS
  • Agentless backups

Description

System requirements

Virtual OS
  • Windows XP (note: Microsoft no longer issues keys for Windows XP: you may not be able to re-activate installations that use OEM keys)
  • Windows Server 2003 (note: Microsoft no longer issues keys for Windows Server 2003: you may not be able to re-activate installations that use OEM keys)
  • Windows Vista
  • Windows Server 2008 / R2
    • Includes Windows Small Business Server 2011
  • Windows 7
  • Windows 8 / 8.1
  • Windows 10
  • Windows Server 2012 / R2
  • Windows Server 2016
  • Windows Server 2019
  • Windows Server 2022

Linux OS Compatability

Linux OS compatibility is the same as the Datto Linux Agent. Hardware Independent Restore (HIR) is not supported for EFI Linux whether agentless of agent based. See Getting started with the Datto Linux Agent for details and a list of supported Linux distributions.

For compatibility information about operating systems not listed here, see the Warnings section of this article.

Virtual hardware requirements
  • Target virtual machines must run virtual machine hardware version 7;or higher. See VMware's Virtual machine hardware versions (external link) article for help determining if your virtual machine's hardware profile is up-to-date.
  • Windows backups: VMware Tools must be present on the target VM.
  • Linux backups: install open-vm-tools. This package includes the necessary VMware Snapshot Provider service.
Network

Communication between the virtual environment and the Datto appliance requires the following ports open for inbound and outbound traffic:

On both the Host and the Datto Appliance:

  • TCP 443 (HTTPS)
  • TCP 902 (Network File Copy)

On the Datto Appliance:

  • TCP 10443 (HTTPS)
  • TCP 9000-9010 (Failover ports)
  • TCP 3260 (iSCSI)
  • TCP/UDP 111 (NFS)
  • TCP/UDP 2049 (NFS)
  • TCP 22 (SSH)
  • TCP 9080 (IO Filter)
  • TCP 8805

In addition, see Unified Backup Networking & Bandwidth Requirements article for general networking requirements.

Hypervisor

Agentless backups run on physical SIRIS and Virtual SIRIS powered by vSphere versions 6.0, 6.5, 6.7, 7.0, and 8.0.

  • vSphere Essentials
  • vSphere Essentials Plus
  • vSphere Standard
  • vSphere Enterprise
  • vSphere Enterprise Plus
  • Evaluation licenses and VMware vCloud Service Provider are unsupported.
  • Hyper-V not currently supported for agentless backups.

Overview

Physical and virtual Datto SIRIS appliances can take agentless backups of virtual machines running VMware vSphere. Agentless backups use the host hypervisor's capabilities to take a snapshot of the production VM (even when shut down).

NOTE  The agentless backup solution is not available for Datto ALTO or Datto NAS appliances.

You do not need to install a backup agent on the target machine for agentless backups to communicate with the Datto appliance. See the Backup Process section of this article for a technical overview of how agentless backups work.

In order for the SIRIS device to backup a protected machine agentlessly, the device must have an active hypervisor connection to the VMware host.

Benefits

  • Communication from VM targets to Datto appliances is quicker and easier.
  • Backups, done through VMware's data storage API (VADP) (external link), are more efficient.
  • Agentless backups work on both Windows and Linux virtual machines.
  • You can run a backup even when a VM is powered off.
  • Other common SIRIS functions remain the same.
  • While virtual machines could still be protected with an agent-based solution, clustered disks may cause issues with backups. See this article for more information.

Limitations

SIRIS Virtual and agentless backups do not support the free version of vSphere.

  • Agentless backups do not work on encrypted VMs
  • Agentless backup support is unavailable for:
    • spanned volumes
    • ESXi shared volumes
    • multiple volumes using the same GUID
    • systems using Logical Volume Management (LVM)
    • backup of deduplicated volumes is untested and may produce inconsistent results.
    • file restore of deduplicated volumes is not possible. Restoration of deduplicated volumes through virtualization, Direct Restore, or Bare Metal Restore, is not supported.
    • volumes formatted using Microsoft's ReFS.
    • Windows systems that contain volumes that use Dynamic Disk Technology (These systems may have issues regardless of whether the Dynamic Disk volumes are included in the backup or not).
    • Backup of User Profile Disks used by the Remote Desktop Service is unsupported. Remote Desktop Service (external link). These volumes should be excluded from backups.

Universal VM Backup may be a viable alternative in the above scenarios.

Agentless backups from a physical device (and failover for Virtual SIRIS) operate through the Network Block Driver Transport Method, which restricts their operating speed to a maximum of 40% of the management network interface speed.

Backup process

Instead of using an agent to create an application aware snapshot on the protected machine, agentless backups interact with the VMware host to request they take a quiesced snapshot. VMware then leverages their VMware tools (or open-vm-tools for linux) to take the application aware backup, then transfer the data back to the datto device.

  1. The Datto appliance uses the hypervisor connection to connect to the vSphere environment.
  2. The VMware snapshot provider (part of VMware tools) takes a snapshot of the VM.
    The first two steps also occur when the Datto pairs with the target VM.
  3. If the Datto device is a virtual appliance, it can use HotAdd (through vddk-fuse) to directly attach the VMDK from the VMware snapshot to itself. HotAdd transfers the backup data over the vSphere management network. As a failover, or if the Datto device is a physical appliance, the Datto appliance connects to the VMDK from the VMware snapshot using the Network Block Device (NBD) protocol. With this type of connection, the VM network transfers the data.
  4. The Datto appliance uses libguestfs to analyze the disk image to get information about the disk structure and the file system(s) on it.
  5. The appliance transfers the backup data from the VMware snapshot of the VMDK to itself, and takes a ZFS snapshot of the disk images in the live dataset, just like an agent-based backup.

Warnings

Operating systems that are not compatible with Datto's standard agentless backup method will be protected by the Universal VM Backup solution. Universal VM Backup is a limited agentless solution that allows you to restore via Export Image or Virtualize via hypervisor methods only.

If you add a new volume to a protected agentless system after it has already been backed up by the Datto appliance, you must reboot the protected host before the new volume can begin backups.

VMware's Changed Block Tracking (CBT) is responsible for identifying changed data blocks between backups for agentless pairings. In rare circumstances, CBT may silently fail to detect changes, resulting in backups that do not contain the modified data. This issue can occur without any direct indication, as CBT does not provide detailed logging for such failures. Regularly monitoring backup integrity and staying updated with VMware patches can help prevent such issues.

Installation

Before you can take an agentless backup, you need to connect the Datto appliance to your hypervisor. For hypervisor connection steps, see the article Connecting A Datto Appliance To A VMware Hypervisor.

To pair a virtual machine for backup on the Datto appliance, see the Pairing a Target System for Agentless Backups article.

The host hypervisor and protected virtual machines must be in a healthy, stable state. For more information, see Agentless Backups: Best Practices.

Frequently asked questions

Agentless backups transfer to the Datto appliance as a sparse image. This type of disk image file is similar to a thin-provisioned VMDK; it takes up only as much disk space as the size of its stored contents. Unlike a thick-provisioned VMDK, a sparse image file should not take up the full provisioned size of the virtual disk.

Sparse images grow in size as the user adds data. Over time, as files are deleted or overwritten by the production VM, both a thin-provisioned disk and a sparse image file will grow because VMware cannot tell that these files have been removed or altered. Although the VM marks these blocks as free in the filesystem they will copy into the backup image.

EXAMPLE  A 100 GB VMDK using 30 GB, but undergoing an additional 50 GB of disk change, could produce a backup of 80 GB. See VMware's article about Growing, thinning, and shrinking virtual disks for VMware ESXi and ESXi (external link) for information about resizing these types of disks.

Virtual Datto SIRIS devices: When backing up a protected virtual machine, virtual Datto devices use the HotAdd VDDK protocol, which attaches the protected machine's disks directly to the Datto device. The amount of free disk space on the appliance's array limits the virtual disk size. Virtual Datto appliances will also failover to the NBD protocol if hot-add fails.

Physical Datto SIRIS devices: These devices use the NBD VDDK protocol. With NBD, VMware recommends using virtual disks that are no larger than 1 TB in size.

The VMkernel's primary function is to orchestrate VM processes. While using the NBD protocol, the VMkernel will automatically cap each session for stability. This cap can result in lower backup throughput; this is so that NBD transfers do not bottleneck VM management and other VMkernel traffic.

To counteract bottlenecks, design your backup policies and job configurations to distribute the load over multiple ESXi hosts instead of running numerous backup jobs from the same ESXi host simultaneously.

Agentless backups use the VMware Changed Block Tracker (CBT), which keeps track of changed or newly-written blocks within a virtual machine. Every time a new backup task begins, the Datto solution uses the VMware CBT values to detect disk change and only back up the changed data.

A power failure or hard shutdown while a virtual machine is powered on could lead to CBT losing track of incremental backups. For additional information on CBT, see Changed Block Tracking (CBT) on virtual machines(external article) in the VMware Knowledge Base.

If a virtual machine's hardware is version 6 or older, or the CBT is corrupt, every backup for that machine will be a full backup until you upgrade the hardware version or repair the CBT.

Code issues in unpatched versions of ESXi 5.5 can cause frequent full backups. Datto recommends keeping your hypervisor versions patched and up-to-date to help avoid these issues.

Third-party agentless solutions running alongside Datto's agentless solution on the same production machine can cause full backups by corrupting the CBT. Datto does not recommend running multiple agentless backup utilities on a production machine at the same time.

While snapshots can be useful as a secondary backup method for short-term or ad-hoc backups, keeping snapshots for an extended period will impact the performance of your production VMs.

While snapshots are growing in size, the Datto appliance will lock the entire LUN on which a VM resides, thereby slowing down I/O performance for that VM and all other VMs sharing the same LUN. Consolidating a virtual disk that has long-term snapshots takes a very long time, and can impact the I/O performance of that virtual machine.

By default, the snapshots Datto appliances take persist for only as long as it takes to back up any given target virtual machine.

Due to how our systems handle Agentless backups the information being read and written may be larger than expected. This is less noticeable in standard Agentless backups as the backup compression will shrink the size of the snapshot. This is more noticeable in Encrypted Agentless backups as there is little to no compression shrinking the snapshot size.

Additional Resources