Cohesity provides a simple way to protect your VMs using the Vsphere VADP protocol and provides constructs like the Policy Manager which ensure the VMs protected by that policy are all consistently backed up.
Lets take a look at the steps involved to protect 40 VMs with Cohesity.
First let's create or edit an existing Policy for the VMs we will be protecting.
In this case, we will edit an existing default Gold Policy and change a couple of parameters as an example and then save this policy as a new policy.
In the above Policy the Blackout Period has been configured to disable the backup to run during the weekdays from 12PM to 5:30PM.
The SLA has been increased to 30 mins.
Next we can now select the VMs to be protected with this Policy.
The VMs can be selected at any level in the Vcenter i.e the Datacenter level, cluster level, host level, or an individual VM level.
When the VMs are selected at a parent level, Automatic backup of newly discovered VMs on that parent can also be configured.
In the example below, I have selected the DC HQ-c2400-Stress-Compute and all the 40 VMs on it to be protected.
Automatic VM protection can be turned On with a single click.
Associate this job with the custom Policy that was created/edited before.
Indexing must be enabled if you want to recover files. If indexing is enabled, the Cohesity Cluster scans all the files in the Backup Job and creates an internal index that can used later to locate files by name for file level recovery.
For you folks who are more technically inclined and would like to understand how this Fully Distributed Integrated Backup software works in the background, please check out my next blog.. here.
Check out a recent video which shows the above in action.