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SG 248554

The document is a draft review of the IBM Storage Defender, focusing on IBM Data Management Service and IBM Data Protect, set for January 2025. It includes comprehensive chapters detailing the introduction, functionalities, and configurations of the IBM Storage Defender and its components. The document serves as a guide for users to understand and utilize the IBM Storage Defender effectively.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
9 views124 pages

SG 248554

The document is a draft review of the IBM Storage Defender, focusing on IBM Data Management Service and IBM Data Protect, set for January 2025. It includes comprehensive chapters detailing the introduction, functionalities, and configurations of the IBM Storage Defender and its components. The document serves as a guide for users to understand and utilize the IBM Storage Defender effectively.

Uploaded by

maulet2001
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 124

Front cover

Draft Document for Review January 14, 2025 4:55 pm SG24-8554-00

IBM Storage Defender: IBM


Data Management Service
and IBM Data Protect
Christian Burns Christopher Vollmar
Paul Conway
Phillip Gerrard
Gary Graham
Richard Hurst
Juan Carlos Jimenez
James Morassutti
Steve Solazzo
Jack Tedjai
Dan Thompson

Redbooks
Draft Document for Review January 14, 2025 4:55 pm 8554edno.fm

IBM Redbooks

IBM Storage Defender: IBM Data Management Service


and IBM Data Protect

January 2025

SG24-8554-00
8554edno.fm Draft Document for Review January 14, 2025 4:55 pm

Note: Before using this information and the product it supports, read the information in “Notices” on page v.

First Edition (January 2025)

This edition applies to IBM Storage Defender Data Protect Version 7.1.1 and 7.1.2.

This document was created or updated on January 14, 2025.

© Copyright International Business Machines Corporation 2025. All rights reserved.


Note to U.S. Government Users Restricted Rights -- Use, duplication or disclosure restricted by GSA ADP Schedule
Contract with IBM Corp.
Draft Document for Review January 14, 2025 4:55 pm 8554TOC.fm

Contents

Notices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .v
Trademarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Comments welcome. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
Stay connected to IBM Redbooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Chapter 1. Introduction to
IBM Storage Defender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.1 Overview of IBM Storage Defender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.2 Overview of IBM Defender Data Protect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.3 Overview of IBM Defender Data Management Service. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Chapter 2. IBM Storage Defender:


Data Management Service (DMS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.1 Data Management Service (DMS) Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.2 IBM Storage Defender DMS Dashboard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.2.1 Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.2.2 System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.2.3 Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.2.4 System View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Chapter 3. IBM Storage Defender:


Data Protect. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.1 Solution Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.1.1 Node Based Scale Out Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.2 What is a Cluster and How does It Work? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.3 Physical / Virtual / Robo Implementations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.4 Cluster setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.4.1 Configuration of a Data Protect Storage Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.4.2 Configuration of a Data Protect Protection Group. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.4.3 Monitor the Data Protect Protection Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.5 IBM Storage Ready Nodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.6 IBM Storage Defender Ready Nodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.7 Registering with IBM Data Management Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.8 VMware Workload Use Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Chapter 4. Protecting VMware Workloads With IBM Data Protect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43


4.1 IBM Data Protect Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.2 Configuration of Data Protect Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.2.1 Configuration of a Data Protect Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4.3 Recovering Data with IBM Data Protect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
4.3.1 Recover from a Data Protect Cluster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
4.3.2 Instant Volume Mount recovery from Data Protect Cluster. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
4.4 Replicating Workloads with IBM Data Protect clusters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4.4.1 VMware replication workflow one-to-one model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4.5 Monitoring the Protection job list . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.6 Recover from Replicated Copies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2025. iii


8554TOC.fm Draft Document for Review January 14, 2025 4:55 pm

4.6.1 Preparing a failover back to the original source cluster. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59


4.7 CloudArchive the Workloads with IBM Data Protect Cluster. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
4.7.1 VMware CloudArchive workflow S3 to IBM Cloud Object Storage (ICOS) . . . . . . 61
4.7.2 VMware CloudArchive restore IBM S3 IBM Cloud Object Storage. . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Chapter 5. Rapid Restore of Virtual Machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69


5.1 VM Recovery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
5.1.1 Recovering VMs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
5.1.2 Instant Mass Restore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
5.2 File or Folder Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
5.2.1 Indexing and Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
5.2.2 Recovering Files or Folders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
5.3 Virtual Disk Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
5.3.1 Recovering Virtual Disks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
5.4 Instant Volume Mount . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
5.4.1 Instant Volume Mounting a VMware virtual disk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
5.4.2 Teardown of a Mounted Volume . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

Chapter 6. Integrating IBM Defender Data Protection with IBM Storage Protect . . . . 95
6.1 Data Protection Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
6.2 Deployment Exercise Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
6.3 Create an S3 Bucket on the IBM Storage Protect Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
6.4 Capture Access Credentials on the SP server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
6.5 Register the S3 Bucket as External Target on Data Protect Cluster. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
6.6 Create Polices to Archive Data to The S3 Bucket. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
6.6.1 Create a Protection Policy for Archiving to the S3 Bucket . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
6.6.2 Configure the Data Protection Group to use the Data Protection Policy. . . . . . . 106
6.7 Monitoring the Protection status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
6.8 Retrieve from the S3 External Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
6.8.1 Retrieve using Global Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
6.8.2 Retrieve using Recoveries Panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
6.9 Additional Process Monitoring Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

iv IBM Storage Defender: IBM Data Management Service and IBM Data Protect
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Notices

This information was developed for products and services offered in the US. This material might be available
from IBM in other languages. However, you may be required to own a copy of the product or product version in
that language in order to access it.

IBM may not offer the products, services, or features discussed in this document in other countries. Consult
your local IBM representative for information on the products and services currently available in your area. Any
reference to an IBM product, program, or service is not intended to state or imply that only that IBM product,
program, or service may be used. Any functionally equivalent product, program, or service that does not
infringe any IBM intellectual property right may be used instead. However, it is the user’s responsibility to
evaluate and verify the operation of any non-IBM product, program, or service.

IBM may have patents or pending patent applications covering subject matter described in this document. The
furnishing of this document does not grant you any license to these patents. You can send license inquiries, in
writing, to:
IBM Director of Licensing, IBM Corporation, North Castle Drive, MD-NC119, Armonk, NY 10504-1785, US

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION PROVIDES THIS PUBLICATION “AS IS”


WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED
TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Some jurisdictions do not allow disclaimer of express or implied warranties in
certain transactions, therefore, this statement may not apply to you.

This information could include technical inaccuracies or typographical errors. Changes are periodically made
to the information herein; these changes will be incorporated in new editions of the publication. IBM may make
improvements and/or changes in the product(s) and/or the program(s) described in this publication at any time
without notice.

Any references in this information to non-IBM websites are provided for convenience only and do not in any
manner serve as an endorsement of those websites. The materials at those websites are not part of the
materials for this IBM product and use of those websites is at your own risk.

IBM may use or distribute any of the information you provide in any way it believes appropriate without
incurring any obligation to you.

The performance data and client examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only. Actual
performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions.

Information concerning non-IBM products was obtained from the suppliers of those products, their published
announcements or other publicly available sources. IBM has not tested those products and cannot confirm the
accuracy of performance, compatibility or any other claims related to non-IBM products. Questions on the
capabilities of non-IBM products should be addressed to the suppliers of those products.

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction or intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and
represent goals and objectives only.

This information contains examples of data and reports used in daily business operations. To illustrate them
as completely as possible, the examples include the names of individuals, companies, brands, and products.
All of these names are fictitious and any similarity to actual people or business enterprises is entirely
coincidental.

COPYRIGHT LICENSE:

This information contains sample application programs in source language, which illustrate programming
techniques on various operating platforms. You may copy, modify, and distribute these sample programs in
any form without payment to IBM, for the purposes of developing, using, marketing or distributing application
programs conforming to the application programming interface for the operating platform for which the sample
programs are written. These examples have not been thoroughly tested under all conditions. IBM, therefore,
cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs. The sample programs are
provided “AS IS”, without warranty of any kind. IBM shall not be liable for any damages arising out of your use
of the sample programs.

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2025. v


8554spec.fm Draft Document for Review January 14, 2025 4:55 pm

Trademarks
IBM, the IBM logo, and ibm.com are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines
Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be
trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright
and trademark information” at https://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml

The following terms are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation,
and might also be trademarks or registered trademarks in other countries.
AIX® IBM Cloud® Redbooks®
DB2® IBM FlashSystem® Redbooks (logo) ®
Enterprise Design Thinking® IBM Security® Storwize®
Guardium® IBM Spectrum® XIV®
IBM® QRadar®

The following terms are trademarks of other companies:

The registered trademark Linux® is used pursuant to a sublicense from the Linux Foundation, the exclusive
licensee of Linus Torvalds, owner of the mark on a worldwide basis.

Microsoft, Windows, and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States,
other countries, or both.

Ceph, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and
other countries.

VMware, VMware vCenter Server, VMware vSphere, and the VMware logo are registered trademarks or
trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.

Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

vi IBM Storage Defender: IBM Data Management Service and IBM Data Protect
Draft Document for Review January 14, 2025 4:55 pm 8554pref.fm

Preface

This IBM Redbooks publication provides a look at the IBM Storage Defender Data
Management Service (DMS) and Data Protect. This includes information to better understand
how IBM Storage Defender is used to protect a number of different workloads as well as
integrate with IBM Storage Protect for offload and archival purposes. Configuration and usage
examples are provided to further explore defining and configuring protection policies. This
document is intended for use by System Administrators and anyone wanting to learn more
about implementing DMS and Defender Data Protect.

Authors
This book was produced by a team of specialists from around the world working with IBM
Redbooks.

Christian Burns is a Principal Worldwide Storage Data Resiliency Architect and IBM
Redbooks Platinum Author based in New Jersey. As a member of the Worldwide Storage
Technical Sales Team at IBM, he works with clients, IBM Business Partners, and IBMers
around the globe, designing and implementing solutions that address the rapidly evolving
cyber and data resiliency challenges facing enterprises today. He has decades of industry
experience in the areas of sales engineering, solution design, and software development.
Christian holds a BA degree in Physics and Computer Science from Rutgers College.

Paul Conway has over 36 years of industry experience in Storage Management and Data
Protection. As an IBM customer, Paul protected large Mainframe and Open Systems Storage
environments using IBM data protection software including DFSMS, DFDSS and Storage
Protect. Paul has been with IBM over 4 years and is currently responsible for working with and
guiding Storage Protect customers as an IBM Storage Protect/Defender Technical Advisor.

Phillip Gerrard is a a Project Leader for the International Technical Support Organization
working out of Beaverton, Oregon. As part of IBM for over 15 years he has authored and
contributed to hundreds of technical documents published to IBM.com and worked directly
with IBM's largest customers to resolve critical situations. As a team lead and Subject Matter
Expert for the IBM Spectrum® Protect support team, he is experienced in leading and
growing international teams of talented IBMers, developing and implementing team
processes, creating and delivering education. Phillip holds a degree in computer science and
business administration from Oregon State University.

Gary Graham is a Brand Technical Specialist covering IBM Defender Data Resilience
solutions for IBM customers in the Southeastern US. Gary has presented at the IBM Edge
conference, and worked on multiple IBM Professional Certification exam teams and currently
has a Distinguished Technical Specialist certification from The Open Group.

Richard Hurst is a cyber-resiliency and storage consultant with IBM’s Expert Labs team.
With 20+ years experience stretching across multiple disciplines, Richard has provided
installation and configuration services as well as providing support for many different name
brand products. As an invaluable member of the IBM’s Expert Labs team Richard has worked
with multiple IBM products including IBM Defender Data Protect, IBM Storage Ceph and IBM
Flashsystems, as well as consulting for IBM’s Cybervault Workshop. Richard Hurst continues
to broaden is skill set through Openshift/IBM Fusion as well as Cybersecurity training.

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2025. vii


8554pref.fm Draft Document for Review January 14, 2025 4:55 pm

Juan Carlos Jimenez is IBM’s world-wide Data Resiliency Product Manager. He is focused
on defining roadmaps, initiatives, and strategy within the various data resiliency software
products that he manages alongside his team. Juan Carlos brings an end-to-end view to
cyber resilience leveraging his expertise in both storage and security. Juan Carlos developed
our Cyber Resiliency Assessment Tool which has been helping numerous enterprises identify
and close gaps in their IT environments.

James Morassutti is a Senior Storage Technical Specialist based out of Toronto, Canada.
His career in IT spans over 20 years in key areas such x86, Networking, Cyber Resiliency and
Storage solutions. James is the National Data Protection SME for Canada, focused on
helping clients design solutions to support their Operational Resiliency and protection their
critical data to support their Cyber Resiliency Practices. James is passionate about
automotive, technology and educated in Mechanical Engineering.

Jack Tedjai is an IBM Certified Expert IT Specialist and IBM Systems subject matter expert,
working in the Northern Europe Infrastructure Lab Expert Services organization. He joined
IBM in 1998, and has more than 25 years of experience in the delivery of Storage, Storage
Virtualize, Backup and Cyber Resilience services for Open Systems. He is mostly involved in
architecture and deployments world-wide for IBM Lab Expert Services, with a focus on IBM
Storage Protect, IBM Storage Protect Plus and IBM Cloud® Object Storage.

Daniel Thompson has been working in IT for more than 40 years. His specialty is data
protection (Backup and Restore, Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity and Cyber
Resiliency). He currently works in the Advanced Technology Group (ATG), IBM Technology,
Americas.

Christopher Vollmar Principal, World Wide Storage Data Resiliency Architect. Christopher is
an IBM Certified IT Specialist (Level 3 Thought Leader) and Storage Architect. He is focused
on helping customers design solutions to support Operational and Cyber Resiliency on
primary and backup data to complement their Cyber Security practices. He is an author of
several IBM Redbooks®, an Enterprise Design Thinking® Co-Creator, and a frequent
speaker at events like IBM THINK, and TechXchange.

Now you can become a published author, too!

Here’s an opportunity to spotlight your skills, grow your career, and become a published
author—all at the same time! Join an IBM Redbooks residency project and help write a book
in your area of expertise, while honing your experience using leading-edge technologies. Your
efforts will help to increase product acceptance and customer satisfaction, as you expand
your network of technical contacts and relationships. Residencies run from two to six weeks
in length, and you can participate either in person or as a remote resident working from your
home base.

Find out more about the residency program, browse the residency index, and apply online at:
ibm.com/redbooks/residencies.html

Comments welcome
Your comments are important to us!

We want our books to be as helpful as possible. Send us your comments about this book or
other IBM Redbooks publications in one of the following ways:
򐂰 Use the online Contact us review Redbooks form found at:

viii IBM Storage Defender: IBM Data Management Service and IBM Data Protect
Draft Document for Review January 14, 2025 4:55 pm 8554pref.fm

ibm.com/redbooks
򐂰 Send your comments in an email to:
redbooks@us.ibm.com
򐂰 Mail your comments to:
IBM Corporation, IBM Redbooks
Dept. HYTD Mail Station P099
2455 South Road
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601-5400

Stay connected to IBM Redbooks


򐂰 Find us on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2130806
򐂰 Explore new Redbooks publications, residencies, and workshops with the IBM Redbooks
weekly newsletter:
https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/subscribe
򐂰 Stay current on recent Redbooks publications with RSS Feeds:
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Preface ix
8554pref.fm Draft Document for Review January 14, 2025 4:55 pm

x IBM Storage Defender: IBM Data Management Service and IBM Data Protect
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Chapter 1. Introduction to
IBM Storage Defender
Just a few decades ago, considerations for data resilience were a much simpler. If a company
lost or damaged an important file or folder, they’d simply load up the previous day’s backup
tape, retrieve a copy of the missing data, and return to operating normally from there.

Those days are long gone. Today, the volume of data and diverse range of workloads have
made backup and restore operations much more complex. Regardless of their size, industry,
or location, every organization must have an active security perimeter to keep out bad actors,
plus effective recovery mechanisms to get back up and running quickly when an attack gets
through.

Although the current world of IT may seem like a dangerous place with new and creative
attempts to exploit vulnerabilities, careful planning and execution of appropriate data security
and data resilience processes can enable organizations to gracefully recover from otherwise
dire situations. This Redbooks publication provides guidance on one of IBM's solutions
dedicated to these use cases, enabling customers to recover rapidly, and at scale.

In this chapter:

򐂰 1.1, “Overview of IBM Storage Defender” on page 12


򐂰 1.2, “Overview of IBM Defender Data Protect” on page 13
򐂰 1.3, “Overview of IBM Defender Data Management Service” on page 14

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2025. 11


8554ch01.fm Draft Document for Review January 14, 2025 4:55 pm

1.1 Overview of IBM Storage Defender


Organizations today need a data resilience strategy that encompasses every aspect of their
on-premises and cloud environments. One which supports all traditional, hybrid cloud,
virtualized, and containerized workloads. IBM Storage Defender software is designed to meet
that need by offering end-to-end data resilience in modern hybrid multi-cloud IT environments
that includes virtual machines (VMs), databases, applications, file systems, SaaS workloads,
and containers.

IBM Storage Defender features a combination of exceptional scalability, multiple layers of


cyber resilience, broad application support, and cost-saving data reduction technologies. By
using SLA-based policies to automate the entire data protection process, including backup,
replication, and secure data retention on-premises and in the cloud, across primary and
backup storage. Cyber resilience is enhanced by key features like immutability, encryption,
and by support for logical air gap to object storage (WORM technology) as well as the ability
to physically air gap data to tape.

Key capabilities of IBM Storage Defender include:

Data Resilience and Compliance


򐂰 Set policies and standards to ensure resilience compliance across the data estate. Govern
your protections, threat response and recovery from one auto updating SaaS console.

Early threat detection


򐂰 IBM Storage Defender is designed to detect threats and anomalies from backup
metadata, array snapshots, and other relevant threat indicators leveraging AI infused
technology. It includes a data resiliency service that enhances existing security systems
by including storage-specific malware and anomaly detection, as well as providing a trust
index to help IT leaders decide where to prioritize the allocation of resources.

Safe and fast recovery, at scale


򐂰 Can enable organizations to validate, recover, and restore data more quickly. Completely
restore data at scale from an immutable backup or snapshot for each workload, very
quickly (eg: 1000s of VMs in minutes).

Flexible licensing
򐂰 Licensing is based on resource units (RUs), providing a cloud-like, utility-based
consumption model for organizations to consume any service within IBM Storage
Defender.

IBM Storage Defender is designed to integrate with other IBM Storage and IBM Security®
solutions, including IBM QRadar®, IBM Guardium®, FlashSystem, IBM Storage Scale, IBM
Storage Ceph, and IBM Storage Fusion. It also includes copy data management tools to
manage and orchestrate application-integrated, hardware snapshots by making copies
available when and where users need them for instant data recovery, or data reuse,
automatically cataloging and managing copy data across hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Defender is comprised of various components designed to meet customers resilience needs.


In this Redbook, we will take a deep dive into two of those components, Defender Data
Protect and the Defender Data Management Service.

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1.2 Overview of IBM Defender Data Protect


Defender Data Protect (DDP) is one of the many components of IBM Storage Defender. This
component offers data management and resiliency for the broadest workload support in the
industry.

Defender Data Protect supports the following workloads:


򐂰 Hypervisors: VMware, M. Hyper V, Nutanix AHV, and Oracle VM (OVM)
򐂰 Databases: Oracle, Oracle (OVM), Oracle RAC, SAP HANA, SAP Oracle, SAP DB2®,
SAP MS SQL, SAP Sybase ASE, Sybase IQ & ASE, IBM DB2, MS SQL, Hadoop, IRIS &
Cache (EPIC)
򐂰 Modern Databases: Cassandra, CouchbaseDB, MySQL, Hbase, MongoDB, PostgreSQL,
and Hive
򐂰 Cloud-Native Databases: CockroachDB, AWS RDS, and AWS Aurora
򐂰 Cloud Applications: AWS VM (EC2), M365, Exchange Online, Azure VM, and Google
Compute
򐂰 Physical: Windows, AIX®, Linux, and Solaris
򐂰 Containers: Kubernetes, and Tanzu
򐂰 File Systems: NetApp, IBM Storage Scale, Google EFS, Elastifile, and Pure flash arrays
򐂰 Applications: Exchange, Microsoft Active Directory, and Microsoft SharePoint

In this Redbook we will deep dive into how this solution protects the most critical workloads
for modern enterprises.

IBM Storage Defender Data Protect boasts a scale-out architecture comprised of clusters.
These clusters can be deployed virtually, in the cloud, or on promise through physical nodes.
These physical nodes include CPU, Memory, Storage, Network, Operating System, File
System, and the Backup Software. An example of these nodes is the IBM Defender Ready
Node. By leveraging this cluster and node architecture, Defender Data Protect can execute
data management operations like backups, cloning, and restores rapidly, at scale. This is
possible by equally spreading the workload or action among all nodes in a cluster. Lastly,
upgrades, and expansions can be done easily and non-disruptively by simply adding more
nodes to a cluster.

Some of the key capabilities of IBM Storage Defender Data Protect that will be covered in this
document are:

Integrated Cybersecurity:
򐂰 The solution has been designed on zero-trust principles to prevent internal attacks, and
threats. It has ransomware, virus and vulnerability detection built in and can protect data
through its Immutable architecture, as well as protect data on immutable targets.
Encryption is available both at-rest and in-flight, as well as integration with SIEM solutions
like QRadar, Splunk and others.

Instant Mass Restore:


򐂰 Enables users to restore a high number of VMs instantly. For example, 200 VMs in around
10 minutes and 2000 VMs in about 40 minutes. This drastically reduced downtown after
an incident like a large-scale malware attack or ransomware attack.

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Global Actionable Search:


򐂰 Search any data (file, VM, objects, etc.) across multiple workloads and across all nodes in
a cluster.

Fast Cloning:
򐂰 Extremely fast cloning of large databases for devOps, testing, and other development use
cases. For example cloning a 2 TB SAP Hana database in about 15 seconds.

Global Space Efficiency:


򐂰 The solution offers industry leading global space efficiency technology through variable
length deduplication, compression, and erasure coding. This reduces the capacity
requirements and lowers licensing costs.

Primary Storage Integration:


򐂰 Defender Data Protect integrates with the IBM Storage FlashSystem family to backup
volumes to Defender Data Protect via volume snapshots, recover from either on-array
snaps or offloaded volume backups, and coordinates HW snaps for VM backup to
minimize VM stuns.

1.3 Overview of IBM Defender Data Management Service


The Defender Management Service (DMS) is the operations center of Defender Data Protect.
This SaaS based GUI enables users to create protection policies, trigger data backups,
execute fast restores, and complete many other operations.

Users can connect Defender Data Protect Clusters, IBM Storage Protect Servers, IBM
FlashSystems, and other assets into the service to drive end-to-end data resiliency
operations from a single pane of glass interface.

Other noteworthy DMS capabilities include:


Quorum:
򐂰 This function limits certain actions, including destructive actions from being carried out by
single users. This is achieved by its permission-based nature where user 1 requests an
action and a second and/or third user needs to approve the request before it is executed.
This could also be considered a form of Two Person Integrity (TPI) checking. This
prevents some destructive attacks and reduces impact of user errors or intentional
damage.

Security Advisor:
򐂰 The security advisor enables users to view the security posture of your implementation
and provides actionable insights so that you can modify the security settings based on the
best practice and business needs.

Simulations:
򐂰 This functionality offers predictive planning models that can make projections about
utilization and storage consumption. This capability is based on historical usage,
workloads, and user-defined what-if scenarios. This empowers users to proactively plan
for various situations, such as acquiring new nodes, integrating new workloads, optimizing
current workloads, and more. Simulations can be created with scenarios using specific
clusters and time periods to help better understand and plan environment changes.

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Reports:
򐂰 This function allows users to create and view an overall summary of the data protection
jobs and storage systems. Additionally, users can analyze data at the granular level using
powerful filtering options. Filter, schedule, email, and download reports to ensure users
who needs detailed information on the environment and its status get what they need
when they need it.

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Chapter 2. IBM Storage Defender:


Data Management Service (DMS)
This chapter contains and overview of the Data Management Service (DMS) and its key
concepts.

This Chapter includes the following topics:


򐂰 2.1, “Data Management Service (DMS) Overview” on page 18
򐂰 2.2, “IBM Storage Defender DMS Dashboard” on page 18

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2.1 Data Management Service (DMS) Overview


IBM Storage Defender Data Management Service (DMS) is a SaaS-based management
platform that provides the ability to have a single view and global management interface for all
IBM Storage Defender Data Protect clusters in your environment. Whether the cluster is
on-premises, cloud or Virtual Edition and regardless of cluster size, the DMS dashboard
quickly connects clusters to Data Management, and provides access from anywhere an
internet connection is available after logging in with your IBMid credentials.

Data Management provides you with the following features:


򐂰 Multi-Cluster Management: Actively manage all your clusters, including multi-cluster
monitoring and reporting, from a single dashboard
򐂰 Global actionable search: Search across clusters and take action directly from the
search results page. For example, search for all unprotected VMs and create jobs to
protect them.
򐂰 SmartAssist: Provides Defender DMS recommendations based on capacity forecasting
and disk failure prediction.
򐂰 Security tools: Detect threats and other anomalies across clusters with the unified Alerts
page. Changes that you make directly to the cluster while using Data Management might
not appear in the Data Management Dashboard for fifteen minutes.

This chapter will provide an overview of IBM Storage Defender Data Management Service.

2.2 IBM Storage Defender DMS Dashboard


The DMS dashboard summary provides a comprehensive view of the various aspects related
to managed Data Protect clusters, this includes cluster health, protection status and
reporting.

Figure 2-1 IBM Storage Defender DMS summary panel

In the summary dashboard users can easily view the following key functions of DMS:
򐂰 The total number of healthy and unhealthy clusters, alert summary, and location of the
Data Protect Clusters

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Figure 2-2 DMS cluster health view

򐂰 Summary of total objects that have been associated with a backup job

Figure 2-3 DMS backup job protection summary

򐂰 Objects that have met their SLA’s in the last 24 hours

Figure 2-4 DMS backup job status summary

򐂰 Storage consumption and data reduction ratios

Figure 2-5 DMS storage consumption summary

The Data Protection view provides a topology of the managed data protect clusters and their
archive and cloud tier targets as well as a summary of the recoveries made in the last 30
days.

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Figure 2-6 DMS data protection topology overview panel

The cloud view provides a summary of cloud activity including data archived\restored as well
as consumption by provider.

Figure 2-7 DMS storage provider overview panel

2.2.1 Security
The Security dashboard provides tools which assist administrators to quickly understand their
current security stance and provides actionable insights with recommendations related to any
potential vulnerabilities and help improve security in the environment.

The Security Advisor uses a scoring system, evaluating each individual cluster under
management to help users understand their current security stance. It then provides
recommendations to improve scores based on a number of key attributes. The scores, icons
and other information provided in this feature indicate how the organization’s deployment and
configuration compares with IBM’s minimum recommended practices. These practices are
designed to supplement (but are not a substitute for) a robust and comprehensive information
security program managed by an organization’s designated experts.

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Figure 2-8 DMS security overview panel

The Security view also summarizes threats detected across backed up objects and their
attributes. This is available under the Anit-ransomware header.

Figure 2-9 DMS security threat overview panel

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Users have the ability to customize the action thresholds, manage notifications, and block
recoveries that have been tagged as a security risk.

Figure 2-10 DMS notification settings panel

Quorum
As a part of the Security section from DMS in the left-hand navigation tab you can explore as
well as the Quorum function. In the nature of Two-Person Integrity (TPI), Quorum approvals is a
feature of DMS than ensures a pre-defined approver, or group of approvers must approve of
actions requested by users prior to those actions taking place. Quorum helps eliminate risk of
destructive operations being performed by administrators due to malicious or accidental
actions.

The quorum dashboard allows users to view all quorum requests that are pending approval as
well as the current user’s requests. From here, users with the appropriate level of access can
also configure quorum groups. Quorum groups are made up of members of the organization
that can be assigned as approvers for various operations against selected clusters.

Figure 2-11 Quorum dashboard

Creating a Quorum Group


Leveraging the Quorum function, users are able to create Quorum Group, that allows the
restriction of a variety of pre-designated functions in a selectable fashion referred to as
“Operations” which will be governed by the group. From there administrators are able to

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select the users that need to approve the actions, how many of the group that need to apply,
for example 3 out of 5 or 2 of 4 etc. The timeline for approval is also a selectable option,
allowing the request a certain amount of to be approved or else it will decline automatically.
Members of the Quorum Group will be notified by email of a pending approval.

Figure 2-12 Create Quorum Group panel

2.2.2 System
The System tab provides access to the various tools for users to manage the Data Protect
Deployment. By selecting the system tab users are presented with the following options:

Health Panel
The health panel (Figure 2-13 on page 24) provides administrators with a consolidated list of
alerts that have been generated by the various clusters in the Data Protect deployment.

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Figure 2-13 IBM Storage Defender Health panel showing a list of Alerts

Alerts
Administrators can select an alert notification to gather more details (Figure 2-14) including
the time the alert was triggered, a detailed description of the severity, type, and the category
of the alert. Users can optionally mark alerts as resolved by either tying it to an existing
resolution or by creating a new resolution description.

Figure 2-14 Alert details panel

򐂰 The resolution summary tab provides administrators with a consolidated view of all the
previously generated resolutions
򐂰 The silence tab allows users to create rules to suppress certain notifications based on the
cluster, severity of the alert, category, type and names
򐂰 The notification tab allows users to customize notification delivery via email or webhooks,
which allows customization on the alerting and the type of alerts as depicted in Figure 2-15
on page 25 (below)
򐂰 Users are able to create alerts specific to clusters, alert levels, preset alert types, alert
categories and alert names with deep granularity

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Figure 2-15 Create notification rule dialog panel

Simulation
The Simulation tab (Figure 2-16 on page 25) provides administrators with the ability to
simulate new workloads against the existing deployment to help predict storage consumption
over time. This is a powerful tool to help administrator proactively plan, if and when additional
storage capacity may be required to support environment changes.

Figure 2-16 Simulation details panel

To create a new simulation, select the blue toggle on the upper right corner of the screen.
From here users can give the simulation a name as well as an end date for the simulation. It
will create the ability to model the effect on the IBM Defender Data Protect Cluster of a variety of
factors that include adding resources, adding new workloads (protection groups) or expanding
the protection groups or Storage domains.

2.2.3 Reporting
The built in reporting tool allows users to schedule or create ad-hoc reports organization wide
or narrowed down to specific clusters or workloads. Reports can be filtered, scheduled,
emailed or downloaded as desired.

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Figure 2-17 DMS Reports panel

DMS provides a comprehensive list of built-in reports to help users gather detailed
information about the environment. At the time of publication, DMS provides the following
built-in reports:
򐂰 Data Protection
– Failures
– Protected/Unprotected Objects
– Protected Objects
– Protection Activities
– Protection Group Summary
– Protection Runs
– Recovery
– System Connection
– System Protection
򐂰 Storage
– Data transferred to external targets
– Storage Consumption by System
– Storage Consumption by Objects
– Storage Consumption by Protection Groups
– Storage Consumption by Storage Domains
– Storage Consumption by Views

These reports provide a comprehensive view of the specific category for the environment.
Users can further customize the results be selecting from a number of filtered options
available within each report.

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Figure 2-18 DMS report example

Reports can be downloaded locally by selecting the download icon and choosing the desired
file format or scheduled for delivery in a variety of formats.

Figure 2-19 Download report formats

2.2.4 System View


The DMS consolidates system information of all the Data Protect clusters under management
to provide a single pane of glass view of the health organization wide. The DMS Dashboard
provides the following information:
򐂰 Health information of all clusters. This includes healthy clusters as well as clusters that
have warnings or errors.
򐂰 A protection view. Which reports on the total number of objects currently under protection.
򐂰 A compliance view. Which reports on the total number of objects that have met their SLA’s
over the last 24 hours.
򐂰 A Consumption view. Which consolidates the total storage consumed as well as available
capacity and overall data reduction ratios.

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Figure 2-20 IBM Storage Defender Data Management Service Dashboard “System Board”

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Chapter 3. IBM Storage Defender:


Data Protect
The IBM Storage Defender Data Protect solution extends the Data Protection and Cyber
Resiliency capabilities of the IBM Storage Portfolio by adding new architecture options for
Data Resiliency using clustered, scale out data protection services that can also provide rapid
recovery capabilities. These Defender Data Protect clusters are managed globally by
the Data Management Service (DMS) that is provided as a SaaS subscription. The new
capabilities in IBM Defender Data Protect are licensed using the new Resource Unit license
model.

The sections below, we will introduce the new architecture and key components, then explore
several deployment options to build an IBM Defender Data Protect and Replica solution to
service Instant Mass Restore capabilities for hundreds of VMs at once.

This chapter provides, describes, discusses, or contains the following:


򐂰 3.1, “Solution Overview” on page 30
򐂰 3.2, “What is a Cluster and How does It Work?” on page 30
򐂰 3.3, “Physical / Virtual / Robo Implementations” on page 31
򐂰 3.4, “Cluster setup” on page 32
򐂰 3.5, “IBM Storage Ready Nodes” on page 39
򐂰 3.6, “IBM Storage Defender Ready Nodes” on page 40
򐂰 3.7, “Registering with IBM Data Management Service” on page 41
򐂰 3.8, “VMware Workload Use Case” on page 42

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3.1 Solution Overview


The diagram below shows an IBM Defender Data Protect environment with the management
plane called the Data Management service (DMS for short). The DMS is cloud based and, is
licensed using a SaaS (Software as a Service) subscription. The Data Protection Resources
below the management plane can be scaled out to fulfill the services requested by the DMS.

Figure 3-1 IBM Storage Defender Data Protect Architecture Overview

3.1.1 Node Based Scale Out Architecture


IBM Defender Data Protect was designed with scalability in mind, so the architecture is
described as “scale out” rather than “scale up”. It scales out by adding more processor nodes
to make a more powerful server component. A cluster can be created on a physical node or a
virtual appliance that runs the IBM Defender Data Protect software. Each node has CPU,
memory, network and storage capacity resources that are managed by the Data Protect
software. Nodes can operate as a single node cluster (ROBO node, Virtual Edition node) or in
groups of nodes called clusters. A minimum of four nodes are required to form an IBM Data
Protect cluster. Three node clusters are possible, but the recommendation for n+2 node
redundancy would require four nodes to allow the cluster to run with up to two nodes being
unavailable.

3.2 What is a Cluster and How does It Work?


The IBM Defender Data Protect scale out architecture is made with building blocks called
nodes. The nodes are server resources that are arranged in clusters to share network, CPU
and storage capacity resources. The clusters have powerful local cluster UI for cluster specific
management and reporting tasks. The clusters roll up their status and health to the Defender
Data Management Service (DMS). Each cluster has disk capacity that is provided as an
integrated immutable filesystem called SpanFS, to provide always-on availability,
non-disruptive upgrades, and a pay-as-you-grow consumption model. SpanFS supports all
the key capabilities required for data protection use cases, including globally distributed NFS,
SMB and S3 storage, unlimited snapshots, global deduplication, encryption, replication,
global indexing and search, as well as the performance needed for both sequential and
random IO.

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SpanFS is an integrated part of Defender Data Protect and provides file services for the data
protection cluster, spreading the IO across the nodes in the cluster to maximize throughput
and performance. The solution offers industry leading global space efficiency technology
through variable length deduplication, compression, and erasure coding. This reduces the
capacity requirements and lowers software licensing costs. IBM Defender Data Protect
provides immutable storage, data encryption and multi-site replication to increase data
resiliency.

Immutability ensures that WORM protected data cannot be changed or modified by any
process or user including cluster administrators. Only the backup service running on the IBM
Storage Data Protect cluster can write to the file system through trusted APIs.

Data at rest encryption using FIPS-validated cryptography supports external key


management.

Deduplication is performed using a unique, variable-length data deduplication technology that


spans an entire cluster, resulting in significant savings across a customer’s entire storage
footprint. SpanFS creates variable length chunks of data, which optimizes the level of
deduplication no matter the type of file.

The in line deduplication process deduplicates data as it is written to the cluster and the
post-process deduplication deduplicates data after it is written to the cluster.

Compression is also default always on capability but can be turned off in selected Storage
Domains. IBM Defender Data Protect leverages in line ZSTD compression. Replication -
Organizations can achieve enterprise-level resiliency with site-to-site replication between IBM
Defender Data Protect clusters. All data on a single IBM Storage Defender Data Protect
cluster can be replicated to one or more clusters through the use of Protection Groups. The
Protection Group specifies the objects (like databases, physical servers, VMs, Views etc.) to
be backed up and replicated. Full and partial fail-over functions are fully automated IBM
Defender Data Protect at ether the cluster level or the DMS level for simple, seamless
recovery.

3.3 Physical / Virtual / Robo Implementations


A cluster can be built to run in traditional datacenters (like Production and D/R), or on the
edge of the enterprise at a remote office or branch office using physical or virtual nodes, or
out in the public cloud using virtual edition.

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The table below shows multiple deployment options for Virtual and Physical nodes as well as
some general suggestions and deployment examples. In this table FETB = Front End TB or the
amount of data in a workload to be protected.

Figure 3-2 Shows a comparison of Virtual and Physical deployment options

IBM Defender Data Protect Virtual Edition is used for a single node IBM Defender Data
Protect cluster or multi-node IBM Defender Data Protect cluster that is hosted on a Virtual
Machine on a VMware vCenter Server or Microsoft Hyper-V server or Nutanix AHV. You can
use a single node Virtual Edition if your environment has smaller offices with reduced
workloads that do not require the full computing power of a IBM Defender Data Protect cluster
running on multiple nodes. In addition, IBM Defender Data Protect Clustered Virtual Edition is
a multiple node IBM Defender Data Protect cluster that can support larger workflows and is
hosted on multiple Virtual Machines in a VMware vCenter Server.

Physical deployment options include the ROBO (Remote Office / Branch Office) single node
that offers more compute power than the single virtual node, and limited capacity. Since this is
a single node, there is no node redundancy and there is limited disk capacity. To protect the
ROBO node, set up replication to a Data Protect cluster to protect the backup data and
provide an additional copy of the backup data at a centrally managed site.

While IBM Defender Data Protect is designed with IBM Storage Ready Nodes in mind it does
not require the use of a particular vendor’s hardware offerings. Several different vendor
platforms have been tested and approved for use including Dell, Cisco, HP and others. For
more information on vendor platforms see the following link (requires login with IBM ID):
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6985577

Physical clusters are the best options for scaling performance and capacity to meet the needs
of Production backup windows and replication to the Disaster Recovery site. Also note the
cluster resources are available for Cyber Resiliency design considerations like Instant Mass
Restore capability and recovery assurance testing.

3.4 Cluster setup


Details for setting up the cluster will vary depending on the choice of hardware or virtual
servers being used for the cluster nodes. See the following link for details (requires login with
IBM ID): https://ibm.biz/BdGrAv

For the exercise in this Redbook, we will be summarizing the cluster setup process using IBM
Storage Ready Nodes

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A pre-requisite to having the services team onsite would be to complete the following tasks:
򐂰 Racking the cluster
򐂰 Cabling the cluster
򐂰 Verifying prerequisites for cluster setup
򐂰 Configuring the BIOS on the IBM Storage Ready Nodes

3.4.1 Configuration of a Data Protect Storage Domain


Use the following steps to configure a Defender Data Protect Storage Domain
1. Expand settings
2. Select summary
3. Click storage domains
4. Click on Create Storage Domain

Figure 3-3 Storage Domain configuration steps 1-4

5. Input a meaningful name for the storage domain


6. Select the type of authentication provider IF required
7. Alter deduplication and compressions if requirements differ from default

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Figure 3-4 Storage Domain configuration steps 5-7

Note: Encryption is either on or off. It cannot be modified after creation. IF encryption needs to be
disabled, you will have to delete the Storage Domain and recreate as needed or create another
storage domain with the same setting including encryption.

8. Enable encryption if required


9. Expand more option
10.Enable quota and alert options if required
11.Set the quota limit for each as needed

Figure 3-5 Storage Domain configuration steps 8-11

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12.Enable Cloud tier if designed for external S3 target


13.Select the external target
14.Specify the Storage Type, Storage class and other options, then Register

Figure 3-6 Storage Domain configuration steps 12-14

15.Configure Threshold for moving data to Cloud tier


16.Select the required fault tolerance and redundancy requirement
17.If required enable Erasure Coding
18.Select Erasure Coding (EC) configuration from drop down
19.Click create

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Figure 3-7 Storage Domain configuration steps 15-19

A note on Fault Tolerance and Redundancy:


Data Protect supports the configuration of fault tolerance at the cluster level, as well as at the
storage domain level. When deploying a cluster, a cluster-level fault tolerance is selected.
This fault tolerance setting becomes the default value for any new storage domains created
on the cluster. Optionally, a different fault-tolerance setting can be selected when creating a
new storage domain or editing an existing domain. Modification of storage domain fault
tolerance is a non-disruptive action and can be performed without taking an outage.

This feature proves invaluable in environments that grow over time. As the amount of physical
hardware within a Data Protect cluster grows to meet the increasing storage demands, or
changes are made to the protected workloads, the likelihood of a hardware change increases
too. Data Protect can adapt to provide increased resilience in such scenarios without
requiring end-user disruption.

Once the new settings are applied, all new writes to the system are protected according to the
newly-chosen resiliency model, while a background process handles re-protecting the
existing data in the storage domain according to the new model settings.

It’s also important to note that the available Erasure Coding options in step 18 in Figure 3-7
depend directly on the Fault Tolerance value selected in step 16.

3.4.2 Configuration of a Data Protect Protection Group


This section demonstrates how to create a Protection Group, combining all of the previously
configured base components together to protect a VMware cluster or ESXi host.

1. Expand Data Protection

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2. Select Protection
3. Click on Protect
4. Choose Virtual machine

Figure 3-8 Data Protection Policy for virtual machines configuration steps 1-4

A new Protection Wizard window will pop up to complete the configuration:


5. Click Add Objects
6. Select your registered VMWare source
7. Search for and select the desired VMs/hosts for protection
8. Click continue

Figure 3-9 Virtual Machine Data Protection Policy configuration steps 5-8

Note: It is possible to view and select VM’s and objects by the folder, list of tag views however it is
suggested to always use VMware vSphere tags support when selecting objects to ensure consistent
data management practices. To use tags select the Tags icon (1) and expand the tags list (2) then
select the desired VMware tag (3).

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Figure 3-10 Virtual Machine Data Protection Policy configuration, vSphere tags

9. Give the protection group a meaningful name


10.Select the policy desired for the protection group
11.Select your storage domain
12.Click on Protect to complete the configuration.

Figure 3-11 Protection Policy for virtual machines configuration steps 8-12

Now the Protection Group is ready to run based on the Protection Policy schedule.

3.4.3 Monitor the Data Protect Protection Group


This section demonstrates how to monitor a Protection Group task:
1. Expand Data Protection
2. Select Protection
3. Usage filter option and typing the VMware Tags “VMtags”

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Figure 3-12 Monitoring a Protection Group, steps 1-3

4. click on the Protection Group VMtags and select date and time to view which VMs are in
the Protection Group backup set.

Figure 3-13 Monitoring the list of protected VMs in a Protection Groups Backup set

5. Select the VM for details task events

Figure 3-14 Protection Group, backup task activity details

3.5 IBM Storage Ready Nodes


IBM Storage Defender Data Protect software installation and configuration services are
available from IBM Professional Services or an approved IBM Business Partner.

The following steps are typically done by the Professional Services team following the
network requirements and data resiliency parameters used in the sizing.
򐂰 Setting up nodes

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򐂰 Creating the initial cluster


򐂰 Setting up data sources and protection policies

Note: The ISO software installation has to be done on each node. Downloading the ISO
image is suggested as a time saver, and having multiple USB devices with the ISO image
can save additional time when there are a larger number of nodes to be installed

3.6 IBM Storage Defender Ready Nodes


The IBM Storage Ready Node platform can be used as the foundation for an advanced scale
out cluster that is highly secure, resilient, and provides exceptional performance using IBM
Storage.

Defender. For detailed advice on designing the ideal solution for your enterprise data
resiliency needs, contact your IBM seller or business partner.

Together they will review the workload types, the size, retention, and change rate of your data
to suggest the necessary scale out cluster architecture needed to meet your enterprise data
resiliency goals.

As stated in the previous sections, a minimal cluster can be made using a quantity of four
nodes (8U total rack space).

Fore information on the latest IBM Storage Defender supported hardware see:
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6985577

Figure 3-15 IBM Storage Ready Nodes storage bays and USB port access via the front of the cabinet

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Figure 3-16 IBM Storage Ready Nodes management and network and optional FC adapter access via
the rear of the cabinet

3.7 Registering with IBM Data Management Service


IBM Storage Defender provide a convenient way to manage the status of Storage Protect
servers along with VMs and other protected workloads registered to the Data Management
service (DMS) GUI. To register an IBM Storage Protect server with the IBM Storage Defender
Data Protect (DDP) DMS, go to the DMS login and select Connection Agents from the left
navigation menu. There you will see an option to download the connection agent for the
Storage Protect server. Use the directions to download and extract the connection agent on
the Storage Protect server.
1. Log into the Data Management service by navigating to the Data Management panel and
clicking the Launch Data management button
2. From the Data Management service page, select the hamburger icon in the top left of the
page and select Settings > Access Management
3. Select the Tokens tab
4. Select the Create box in the upper right corner of the screen. A Create Token input window
appears with two input fields, Name and Type. The Name field is a user provided name for
this token. Change the Type field to IBM. Select Create to create the token.
5. Before closing the Create Token window, copy the token by selecting the copy icon.
6. Register the claim using the following command
/opt/ibm/defender/bin/dcli claim register --token=<token copied from previous
step>

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7. To start the Connection Agent, Run the following command


/opt/ibm/defender/bin/dcli eagle-agent start

IBM Storage Defender Data Protect v7.1.0 and beyond can be integrated with snapshots from
the following SAN storage arrays:
򐂰 IBM FlashSystems (Includes immutable IBM Safeguarded copy snapshots)
򐂰 Nimble Storage, HPE Alletra 5000, and/or HPE Alletra 6000
򐂰 Pure Storage Array

Registering VM Hypervisors:
When creating a Protection Group, you can select an existing source, policy, or storage
domain. You can also create them while creating the Protection Group. However, you might
find it easier to create them prior to creating the Protection Group, as described in Chapter 6,
“Integrating IBM Defender Data Protection with IBM Storage Protect” on page 95 of this
document.

3.8 VMware Workload Use Case


One of the key capabilities of IBM Storage Defender Data Protect is the ability to perform
Instant mass Restore to drastically reduce downtime after an incident like a large-scale
malware attack or ransomware attack.

Recovering VMS doc reference: https://ibm.biz/BdGrAb

IBM Defender Data Protect can recover Protected Objects (such as VMs) from a Snapshot
created earlier by a Protection Group. You can recover VMs from a cluster or a currently
registered archive. You can recover VMs to their original location or a new location. The scale
out architecture of the IBM Defender Data Protect cluster provides the resources needed to
do large scale recovery of hundreds of VMs at a time. This greatly improves the RTO for
groups of servers and applications.

For further information see Chapter 6, “Integrating IBM Defender Data Protection with IBM
Storage Protect” on page 95 which will explore the VM backup process and the Instant Mass
Restore capability using a lab environment.

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Chapter 4. Protecting VMware Workloads


With IBM Data Protect
In this chapter, we will explore key concepts, different functions and features of IBM Data
Protect as well as how to configure agentless backup workloads designated for a VMWare
environment through vCenter or a single ESXi host. Backups are snapshot based incremental
forever backup with the ability to recover a whole VM or restore a specific file/folder within a
VM.

This chapter includes the following topics:


򐂰 4.1, “IBM Data Protect Overview” on page 44
򐂰 4.2, “Configuration of Data Protect Sources” on page 44
򐂰 4.3, “Recovering Data with IBM Data Protect” on page 47
򐂰 4.4, “Replicating Workloads with IBM Data Protect clusters” on page 53
򐂰 4.5, “Monitoring the Protection job list” on page 56
򐂰 4.6, “Recover from Replicated Copies” on page 57
򐂰 4.7, “CloudArchive the Workloads with IBM Data Protect Cluster” on page 61

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4.1 IBM Data Protect Overview


IBM Data Protect is a powerful tool in the hands of an administrator. An administrator will
benefit from understanding the many features and functions that will help an organization
realize the full potential of IBM Storage Defender Protect’s ability to secure data from
potential threats. To help draw visual clarity, below is a list of functions and definitions.

Definitions used in this chapter:


Protection - Protection is used to define parameters around a specific workload, such as a
type of workload, objects to backup/protect, a policy for
retention/frequency and the storage domain to which the data sets will
be stored within.
Sources - Sources are used to register (attach) a source host.
Policies - Policies are parameters for retention, frequency, location to where backup is being
stored as well as designating replication, archive location and cloud
destination.
Storage Domains - Storage Domains are used to define how the data will be processed
(dedup and/or compression), stored, quotas can be set as well as
Fault tolerance & redundancy can be defined.
Remote Cluster – Remote Cluster option is used to configure replication targets for
replicated protection
External Targets – External target allows for archival or tiering targets to be configured for
additional copies of data sets.

The next few sections will walk through configuring each feature, starting with registering
sources to configuring a complete protection policy, with the end goal of completing a
protection policy for VMWare environments, as well as configuring additional copies for
replication and/or archival.

4.2 Configuration of Data Protect Sources


When configuring IBM Data Protect sources, ‘sources’ refer to a host or hosts designated for
protection. The focus of this Redbook and its examples use sources that contain Virtual Machines,
specifically VMWare.

The following example (Figure 4-1 on page 45) shows the steps used to Register new virtual
machines and configure a new source:
1. Expand the Data Protection section on the left side of the Defender GUI
2. Click on Sources, then select Register
3. Select Virtual Machines for registration then select the source type from the drop down
4. Select VMWare: vCenter or ESXi host
5. Fill out the IP/hostname, Username, password for the designated VMWare cluster/host
6. Enable any of the listed options that are desired for Defender to use with the VMware
environment this will be applied to
7. Click Register to complete the registration process

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Figure 4-1 Register Sources, steps 5-7

Note: As a best practice, it is strongly recommended to have a minimum of 10GbE links, or


higher, between IBM Data Protect cluster and the VMWare hosts to achieve the most
effective RPO/RTO.

4.2.1 Configuration of a Data Protect Policy


Policies are the mechanism used by Defender for configuring the retention and frequency of
recovery points, as well as location to where backup is being stored, replication target,
archive location and cloud destination.

The following example shows the steps needed to configure a Data Protect policy for the
previously configured VMware backup.
1. Expand Data Protection
2. Click on Policies
3. Click on Create Policy
4. Give a policy name
5. Set the frequency of the backup (Backup)
6. Set the retention of each copy (Primary Copy)
7. Click on More options

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Figure 4-2 Policy Sources configuration steps 1-7

8. Configure Replication, Archive or CloudSpin as needed for the backup settings


9. Click create

Figure 4-3 Policy Sources configuration steps 8 and 9.

Note: Replication, Archive or Cloudspin can only be applied to a policy which will be attached to a
data protection group. Replication, Archive and Cloudspin have their own frequency/retention when
configuring. This will be discussed later in chapter.

To help meet required legal obligations, the following additional backup options are available:
򐂰 Quality of Services (QoS) - Policy determines the type of storage used and the latency
factor in writing data to the view.
򐂰 Periodic Full backup - Periodic Full Backups are scheduled for: Day, Week, Month, Year.
Schedules can also be made for multiple periodic full backups with different frequencies
and dates.

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򐂰 Continuous Data Protection - Continuous Data Protection defines the CDP schedule for
capturing logs from the VMs as opposed to restore the VM applications to a point-in-time
as instead of periodic snapshots available with regular backups.
򐂰 Quiet Times - Quiet Times define time periods when new protection runs are not started.
򐂰 Customize Retires - Customize Retries by default, Data Protect attempts to capture
Snapshots three times before the protection run fails. The default time between retries is
five minutes. Here you can customize the number of retries and how long to wait between
each attempt.
򐂰 BMR (Bare Metal Recovery) Backup - BMR Backup provides a backup schedule and
retention period for Bare Machine Recovery (BMR) system data on a physical server.
򐂰 Log Backup - Log Backup adds a database logs schedule if there are plans on restoring
databases to a specific point in time between two full database server backups.

4.3 Recovering Data with IBM Data Protect


In this section we outline the recovery types available, tasks related to recovery and steps
required when recovering data for a protected Data Protect cluster.

4.3.1 Recover from a Data Protect Cluster


When recovering from an IBM Data Protect cluster, the following tasks and operations will be
created and run:
1. A recovery task gets created
2. The IBM Data Protect cluster communicates with ESXi or vCenter (based on the source
registration) to validate current inventory and the selected recovery task settings
3. The IBM Data Protect cluster creates an internal View, clones the VM snapshot (contains
VM files), and mounts the View on the target ESXi host as an NFS datastore
4. The cloned VM snapshot is migrated to the primary datastore by Storage vMotion
5. IBM Defender Data Protect unmounts and detaches the IBM Defender Data Protect NFS
datastore/View from the ESXi host once the storage vMotion is complete

IBM Data Protect Cluster supports two methods of recovery:

Instant Recovery:

Instant recovery enables the recovery of, and access to VMs within minutes, with access to
the VMs available while the restore is ongoing. Once the recovery is initiated the VMs will be
instantly available after the recovery to the target location begins. Upon completion of the
recovery, the VM data will be moved to the target storage location. The VM can be accessed
when the data is copied to the VM from the IBM Defender Data Protect cluster. In these
cases, the VM's performance may be slow while the Storage vMotion is still in progress. To
perform instant recovery, specify a recovery point (by selecting a backup or backup copy) and
a target location where the recovered VM will reside.

Copy Recovery:

The VMs will be available in the target location only after all data is copied to the target
storage from the source location (IBM Storage Defender Data Protect cluster or cloud). Once
the restore is complete, the VM will be available to use.

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Note: If you chose to keep the VM in a powered-off state when initiating instant recovery, wait for
the Storage vMotion to complete before powering the VM on. As a best practice, IBM Storage
Defender Data Protect recommends for better performance, to choose Copy Recovery for
powered-off VMs.

To perform a VM recovery:
1. Expand Data Protection
2. Select Recoveries
3. Click on Recover
4. Select Virtual Machines
5. Select VMs

Figure 4-4 Recovering VM with Data Protect, steps 4-5

6. Filter by Protection Group (VMtags)


7. Search by words (W2012_AD)

Figure 4-5 Recovering VM with Data Protect, steps 6-7

8. Select the VM to recover and Next for the recovery method (Instant Recovery)
9. Select the Existing VM Handling

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Figure 4-6 Recovering VM with Data Protect, steps 8-12

10.None:
Recover will fail if there is an existing VM: Recovers the VM as a new VM and retains the
original VM. In the Rename field available in the Recovery Options, specify the name of
the recovered VM by adding prefix and/or suffix strings to the name of the original VM. By
default, the recovered VM is named as copy-<original_VM_name>.
11.Overwrite Existing VM:
Recovers the VM by deleting the original VM. The recovered VM will have the original VM
name. When choosing this option, the original VM is deleted prior to the recovery taking
place. A recovery failure will result in the loss of the original VM.

Note: ‘Attempt Differential Recovery’: Attempts to recover the VM by overwriting only the difference
between the original VM and the snapshot selected for recovery. Any newly added data in the
original VM is deleted. If you want to reclaim free space for thin-provisioned disks, then IBM Storage
Defender Data Protect recommends not to attempt differential recovery and only perform a recovery
using Overwrite Existing VM. Differential recovery reduces the amount of data transfered during the
recovery process. In the pulse log, you can view the amount of data transfer saved by selecting
differential recovery.

12.Keep Existing VM: Recover the VM as a new VM with the original VM name. The original
VM is retained powered off. The original VM will be renamed to
obsolete_<time_stamp><Orginal_VM_Name>.
13.Finish the recover task and monitor the workflow. If needed review the recovery activity log
associated with the recovery process.

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Figure 4-7 Data Protect Instance Recovery vMotion from NFS to Production

Figure 4-8 Data Protect Recover Activity Log

4.3.2 Instant Volume Mount recovery from Data Protect Cluster


The Instant Volume Mount operation restores an entire volume, to a running VM, and is the
best way to restore data when a large data set needs to be recovered. This restoration
method mounts the restored VMDK to a Windows VM allowing access to copy the required
data wherever it is needed.

To recover a VMDK as Instant Volume Mount:


1. Expand Data Protection
2. Select Recoveries
3. Click on Recover
4. Select Virtual Machines
5. Select Instant Volume Mount

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Figure 4-9 Instant Volume Mount recovery from Data Protect, steps 4-5

6. Filter by Protection Group (VMtags)


7. Search by string (W2012_AD)

Figure 4-10 Instant Volume Mount recovery from Data Protect, steps 6-7

8. Next select the recover options and the volume to recover


9. The default recover option will be the Original Location (Figure 4-11). If it is required that the
vmdk should mount to another VM target, select New Location and browse to the vCenter
and VM where the vmdk should be mounted (Figure 4-12 on page 52).

Figure 4-11 Instant Volume Mount recovery from Data Protect, steps 8-9

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Figure 4-12 Instant Volume Mount recovery to a new VM location

10.Finish recover and monitor the workflow

Figure 4-13 Instant Volume Mount recovery from Data Protect activity log

The volume will be available in Windows disk manager and can be brought online via Windows
disk management.

Figure 4-14 Instant Volume Mount recovery from Protect Windows volume status

When access to the volume is no longer needed, use the “Teardown” option on the mounted
volume in the Data Protect GUI to remove the volume from the target. The actions that occur
during a teardown are described in the following procedure:

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1. The Data Protect cluster deletes the compute instances of the cloned VM object in the
ESXi host.
2. The VM files (such as VMDK and VMX) are deleted on the view acting as a datastore.
3. If no VMs are using the view (datastore), the view is umounted from all ESXi hosts.

Figure 4-15 Volume recovery Teardown option

4.4 Replicating Workloads with IBM Data Protect clusters


With IBM Storage Defender Data Protect, backups that are ingested in the IBM Data Protect
cluster can be replicated to one or more target clusters. IBM Data Protect supports the
following replication configurations:
1. One-to-one model
– A single production cluster can backup to a disaster recovery site
2. One-to-many model
– A single production cluster can backup to multiple disaster recovery sites
3. Many-to-one model
– Multiple production cluster can backup to remote cluster
4. Many-to-many model
– Multiple production cluster can backup to multiple remote clusters across several sites

This technology works in conjunction with global data deduplication to greatly reduce storage
requirements when data is spread across several sites. This also allows for a reduction in the
network bandwidth required for replication of data for DR purposes.

4.4.1 VMware replication workflow one-to-one model


In this section, the replication workflow of VMware and IBM Data Protect Cluster according to
the design principal One-To-One is described in further detail. The backup data originating
from the source VMware vCenter on the primary host are ingested in the primary IBM Data
Protect cluster DC1, which is then replicated to a secondary DR cluster (DC2).

Figure 4-16 Replication workload One-To-One model

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The DR cluster in DC2 can be failed over to the VMware vCenter Cluster to continuity backup
and restore the production workload. After a successful failover, the option exists to fail back
to DC1 and continue using it as the primary cluster.

IP Failover and Load Balancing


Each node has a Virtual IP address (VIP), and clients can access any node on the cluster
using its VIP. When the node that was directly serving a client goes down, the VIP seamlessly
switches over to another available node. The client continues to access the same IP address
and the fully distributed architecture allows the cluster to access client data that is physically
present on any node on the cluster. The cluster depends on an external DNS server to do a
round-robin on the VIP addresses so that client requests can be load-balanced.

The IBM Data Protect Cluster performs source-side data deduplication and sends only
changed data in increments to the other site. The Cluster also continues to scan and
auto-heal on the other site.

Register Remote Cluster


To register a remote cluster, the ip-address of the node, node-cluster, as well as the admin
account and password are required. In a multiple node cluster always used the Virtual
IP-address (VIP) to register the remote cluster.

Note: The recommend best practice is to use one virtual IP for each cluster node

After connecting the clusters, it is possible to enable Remote Access [1] and Replication [2].
Replication is done by Storage Domain pairing. Map the storage domains in the source
cluster to storage domains in the remote cluster, Figure 4-17.

Figure 4-17 Remote Cluster setup with Paired Storage Domains for Replication

Enable any additional features to apply to the cluster pairing configuration. Once the pairing is
set up on between clusters, configure the pairing on the other cluster to point back to this
primary cluster.

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After the replication setup is finished, update the existing backup policies.
From Data Protection select ‘Policies’ then to configure:
1. In the replication field selected “replicate to”: Remote Cluster
2. Select the desired host name as the remote “Replication Target”

Note: The following options may be toggled on/off as desired for the cluster
򐂰 Outbound Compression
򐂰 Distribute Load
򐂰 Encryption In-flight
򐂰 Throttle
򐂰 Quiet time and Throttle Overrides

Figure 4-18 Modify the existing backup policy

After modifying the policies, double check the policies details view to ensure the configuration
is correct.

Figure 4-19 Reviewing the backup policy to confirm replication feature is enabled

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4.5 Monitoring the Protection job list


To monitor the Protection jobs, use the left menu to navigate to the Data Protect section:

Under Data Protection select ‘Protection’ and Click on the protection group. For this example
the group name is “DP01-P-VMs-Replication”.

Figure 4-20 Protection group status

Selecting the Protection Group will then display a list of the replication tasks associated with
the group.

Figure 4-21 Backup and replication task details

Once the list of jobs for the group is displayed, click on the desired job you wish to monitor, in
this example the job list of “Nov 25, 2023 6:30pm” by clicking on it and selecting the tab
“Replication” the details of the jobs replication process and reviewed.
In this example, the replication job did finish successfully with 16 GiB Logical Data backed up
and 1 GiB of data transferred to the target replication group.

Figure 4-22 Replication task details

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4.6 Recover from Replicated Copies


In this section we will describe how to recover data from Replicated Copies in the event that a
disaster strikes the Source Cluster. This can also be used when there is planned
maintenance outage of the Source Cluster to maintain access to needed data and systems.
When the IBM Defender Data Protect cluster or the Source is down or not available,
Protection Groups can be failed over to the replication partner to maintain continuity.

After creating a Protection Group on a cluster with a replication schedule, once the first
snapshot is replicated, the Protection Group is mark as ‘Failover Ready’ and the Protection
Group become inactive. The Objects (VMs) and Policy are no longer associated with the
inactive Protection Group.

Figure 4-23 Protection Group Active / Inactive status

When an active Protection Group is deactivated, the Protection Group becomes Failover
Ready. The selected VMs and Policy are still associated with the Protection Group on the
source cluster. Snapshots will no longer be captured by the original Protection Group on the
original capturing cluster. However, the existing snapshots captured by the Protection Group
are not deleted, they remain stored in the associated storage domain.

In the following example, the active Protection Group on the source cluster is
DP01-P-VMs-Replication. The following actions can be taken on this Protection Group: Run
Now, Pause Future Runs, Deactivate, Edit and Delete.

Figure 4-24 Protection Group Actions

On the replicated cluster the Protection Group is marked as inactive and Failover Ready. This
Protection Group will only have the options: Failover and Delete.

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Figure 4-25 Inactive Protection Group Actions

When activating the Failover feature specify the source vCenter server where recovered VMs
will be placed. The example below shows vcenter8 specified as the new source.

Note the following message: On Failover this Protection Group will be activated on this
Cluster. If this Inactive Protection Group was created by replication, this Failover causes the
rejection of the incoming replicated Snapshots created by the associated Protection Group on
the Primary Cluster. As part of the Failover, you can recover VMs from Snapshots located on
this Cluster. Specify a Source to place the recovered VMs.

Figure 4-26 Protection Group configured for failover allowing continuous protection

After the Failover feature is activated the Protection Group DP01-P-VMs-Replication now has
the following options available: Run Now, Pause Future Runs, Deactivate, Edit and Delete.

Figure 4-27 Protection Group Available Actions after Failover

The Protection Group is now ready to continue protecting the VMs on the replicated cluster
and, there is now the ability to Edit the objects which require protection, Figure 4-28.

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Figure 4-28 Failover Protection Group for continuous protection, Editing a workload

Note: If a failover back to the original cluster is required, choose “Deactivate” on the
Protection Group for the source cluster.

4.6.1 Preparing a failover back to the original source cluster.


When the original source cluster has been returned to an available and accessible status, the
system can be reverted back to running on the primary cluster by selecting “Deactivate” on
the backup cluster. If the backup Protection Group is not Deactivated, the local backup job
will continue to run successfully but the replication tasks will end in error state (Figure 4-29).

Figure 4-29 Fallback Protection Group for continuous protection, replication error.

In this example, the backup finished successfully with 287.2 MB of incremental data written
(Figure 4-30 on page 59).

Figure 4-30 Fallback Protection Group for continuous protection, local backup status

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If the original source cluster is up and running, then “Deactivate Only” can be selected to
make the Protection Group Failover Ready, Figure 4-31.

Figure 4-31 Fallback Protection Group deactivate option

Once ‘Deactivate’ is selected, the following options are presented for the Fallback cluster
(Figure 4-32).

Figure 4-32 Fallback Protection Group for continuous protection, Deactivate Only confirmation

Figure 4-33 Note: The Deactivate and power off VMs options are only valid if there is an
Active/Passive Datacenter or each vCenter on each Datacenter.

Figure 4-34 Fallback Protection Group for continuous protection, Re-Sync after Deactivate Only

In this example, once the replication task finishes the Re-sync is completed. The run details
show the replication task completed within 4m57s and replicated 1.7GB of data.

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Figure 4-35 Fallback Protection Group for continuous protection, Re-Sync incremental Data Written

Now that replication is complete showing the full 1.7 GiB as Replicated Data.

4.7 CloudArchive the Workloads with IBM Data Protect Cluster


In today’s technology-driven world, it is a major challenge having to store, protect and
maintain availability of the ever-growing amount of data being created; think of everything
from sensitive HR data and healthcare records to large media and entertainment files. As
many organizations store their growing data collections on network-attached storage
(GPFS/NAS) and run most of their workloads on VMWare infrastructure, it has never been
more important to focus on NAS and VMWare data protection, how to store, protect and retain
all that data.

CloudArchive Direct (CAD) is a policy-driven archival feature in IBM Storage Defender Data
Protect that was built specifically to address these challenges by streaming data directly to
lower-cost storage on an External Target without storing local backups. And While IBM
Storage Defender Data Protect does not store the data, it indexes it and stores the metadata
locally for fast search and recovery while offering options to compress and encrypt the data.

IBM Data Protect CloudArchive Direct can help to reliably archive this dataset securely to a
supported S3 object store, one of which includes on premise IBM Cloud Object Storage.

4.7.1 VMware CloudArchive workflow S3 to IBM Cloud Object Storage (ICOS)


In this section, we describe the CloudArchive workflow of VMware according and provide an
example of a One-to-One configuration using IBM Data Protect CAD. The backup data
originates from the source VMware vCenter on the primary host and is then ingest to the
primary IBM Data Protect cluster DC1. This data is then replicated to a secondary (DR)
cluster DC2. In this configuration there is also an optional step of using the on-premises IBM
iCOS erasure coding process solution for long-term data retention.

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Figure 4-36 One to One CloudArchive workflow

Register External Targets as S3Compatible


To register an External Target the ip-address of the endpoint (iCOS Accessor) is needed, as
is the Bucket name, admin Access Key ID and the Secret Access Key.

From the Infrastructure tab, select ‘External Targets’ then ‘Add external target’. When
presented with the External Target fields, this example was configured using the following
settings:
򐂰 select “Purpose”: Archival
򐂰 select “Storage Type”: S3Compatible
򐂰 select “Storage Class”: Regular
򐂰 fill-in “Bucket Name”: iCOSbucket
򐂰 fill-in “Access Key ID”: iCOSkeyID
򐂰 fill-in “Secret Access Key”: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
򐂰 fill-in “Endpoint”: 10.0.2.x
򐂰 fill-in “AWS Signature Version”: Ver 4
򐂰 fill-in “External Target Name”: AnyName
򐂰 fill-in “Archival Format”: Incremental with Periodic Full

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Figure 4-37 Register External Target IBM iCOS configuration example

Select Register to complete the registration process and finish creating the external target.

Incremental with Periodic Full:


The first archive of a Protection Group is always a Reference Full Archive. A Reference Full
forms the basis for Incremental Archives. With incremental archives, the next archive after a
reference full is an Incremental Archive and designates the Reference Full Archive as its
reference.

An Incremental Archive contains only data that is different between its reference’s snapshot
and the snapshot being archived. Once initiated, the changed blocks are identified and any
changed data blocks are compared to the reference snapshot. Only the necessary data is
sent to the external target. If deduplication is enabled and data blocks have not changed, only
metadata is transferred.

To reconstruct this snapshot of an incremental archive, both the incremental and the
reference full must be processed. Then, the next Incremental Archive constitutes an
increment on top of the previous incremental archive, i.e. it designates the previous
Incremental Archive as its reference. In this way, incremental archives form an “archival chain”
that starts at the selected archive and ends with the Reference Full.

In order to limit the number of archives that must be processed to restore a snapshot, the
chain is “broken” every 90 days. When the threshold is reached, the next archive will not be
an Incremental Archive, but rather a Periodic Full Archive. A regular, non-reference Full
Archive is full in the sense that it covers all previous increments since the Reference Full
Archive. However, the Periodic Full still refers to the Reference Full archive as its base, similar
to the initial Incremental Archive.

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The next Incremental Archive after a Full Archive will use the Full Archive as its a reference.

The threshold is not configurable through the web interface and is always 90 days regardless
of how many archives have been performed.

Figure 4-38 Incremental Archives reference workflow - using Reference Full Archive

During incremental archives, if the use of the current Reference Full Archive becomes too
inefficient, mainly if its utilization as a reference drops below 50%, the Reference Full Archive
is retired. At this point a new Reference Full Archive will be created.

Figure 4-39 Reference Full Archive workflow - new base Reference Full Archive

Retiring a Reference Full Archive means that the next time a Full Archive needs to be
created, it is created as a Reference Full Archive, rather than a regular non-reference Full
Archive. The next Incremental then uses the new Reference Full Archive as its reference
base.

CloudArchive Direct (CAD) incremental Forever:


Enabling this option will perform a first full archive and then continue with incremental forever
archival of data from the Data Protect cluster to an external target. Incremental forever
archival eliminates the need for periodic full archive and supports global deduplication, which
improves utilization of the target storage location.

This option is enabled by default when registering a new external target. To enable this option
for an existing registered external target, edit the registered target to enable this option. The
migration from Incremental Archival to Incremental Forever Archival will take place during the
next reference archive creation.

Note: IBM recommends using Incremental Forever and turning on Source Side
Deduplication. This increases cloud performance and reduces the amount of data that the
Data Protect cluster transfers to the external target.

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Figure 4-40 Default settings when Registering an External Target

4.7.2 VMware CloudArchive restore IBM S3 IBM Cloud Object Storage


The following section provides an example of selecting and restoring an archive from IBM S3
iCOS. To perform the restore, select the Data Protection tab, then select ‘Recoveries’ and
finally ‘Recover’. From here, filter the selections to find the desired VM archives:

Select the desired VM from the list to restore, then click on the pencil icon as shown in
Figure 4-41 on page 65 to specify the location of the cloud and the recovery point.

Figure 4-41 Virtual Machine restore settings pencil icon

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Figure 4-42 Point in time recover from cloud location

Once the archive is chosen and selected, the “Recovery Method” prompt will allow a choice of
recovery methods and options. For this example the ‘Instance Recovery’ was selected and
“Existing VM Handling”: Keep Existing VM option was used. Note that this option will power
off and rename the existing VM as “_obsolete_xxx”. (Figure 4-43)

Figure 4-43 Recover method CloudArchive

In the activity log for the recovery process we can see the recovery is from the iCOS location
(indicated by the kListVaultFSfiles task, Figure 4-44 on page 66).

Figure 4-44 Recovery Activity with CloudArchive task creation details

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Figure 4-45 Recovery Activity with CloudArchive full action summary

The recovery snapshot is exported and can be seen in the NFS view for the vCenter
DataCenter. The VM is then relocated to the original datastore. After the VM is successful
cloned the NFS view is removed (Figure 4-45).

Figure 4-46 Instant recovery CloudArchive to vCenter

From the vCenter tasks, the VM creation and VMotion processes can be monitored for the
recovered VM. Once the tasks are complete the recovery process is finished.

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Chapter 5. Rapid Restore of Virtual


Machines
In Chapter 4, “Protecting VMware Workloads With IBM Data Protect” on page 43 we learned
about the various features and capabilities that Defender Data Protect offers for the
protection of VMware virtual machine workloads. Chapter 5 will explore the different VMware
recovery options available with Defender Data Protect:
򐂰 5.1, “VM Recovery” on page 70
򐂰 5.2, “File or Folder Recovery” on page 77
򐂰 5.3, “Virtual Disk Recovery” on page 85
򐂰 5.4, “Instant Volume Mount” on page 90

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5.1 VM Recovery
Defender Data Protect allows for the recovery of one or more protected virtual machines from
snapshots created previously by a Defender Data Protect Protection Group. See chapter 4 for
more details on protecting VMware workloads. VMs can be recovered directly from a Data
Protect cluster, or alternatively, from a currently registered archival external target, and the
destination can be the original location or a new location.

5.1.1 Recovering VMs


To recover a VMware virtual machine from a Defender Data Protect backup:
1. Use the DMS left navigation menu to go to Data Protection > Recoveries, as shown in
Figure 5-1:

Figure 5-1 Storage Defender Data Protection menu

2. Then use the Recover menu on the top right of the Recoveries page to select Recover >
Virtual Machines > VMs, as shown in Figure 5-2:

Figure 5-2 Virtual Machines Recovery Panel

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3. In the New Recovery window, enter a wildcard search term to search for individual VMs or
protection groups, as shown in Figure 5-3:

Figure 5-3 New recovery VM search panel

Note: For each virtual machine selected, Data Protect will automatically select the most
recent snapshot. To select an earlier snapshot for any of the selected VMs, click the pencil
icon for that VM in the right-hand column, then use the pop-up window to select the desired
snapshot, as shown in Figure 5-4.

Figure 5-4 Alternate restore point selection panel

Note:
򐂰 Selecting a Protection Group (In our example, "Daily VM Backups" or "DRS Sensor
Backups") will restore all the VMs present in that protection group at the time of the
selected backup.
򐂰 In a single restore job, only VMs or Protection Groups with snapshots in the same
storage domain and data protection source can be selected.
򐂰 In this example, there are only local (on-cluster) snapshots available for recovery. If the
example Data Protect cluster had created archive copies on external targets like cloud
storage or Spectrum Protect, those snapshots would be indicated by cloud icons under
the Location column. Simply click on the cloud icon to recover from an archival
snapshot.

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4. Once you have selected the desired snapshot(s), click the blue Next: Recover Options
button to proceed.
5. On the next screen, note the summary of the selected VMs at the top of page, as show, in
Figure 5-5. If necessary, click the pencil icon to edit your selection.

Figure 5-5 Virtual machine recovery summary panel

Also note that the Recover To value is set to Original Location. In our example, the two
selected VMs will be restored to their original location. To recover the selected VMs to an
alternate location, click New Location, then use the Registered Source drop-down menu to
either select from and existing registered ESX host or vCenter, or to register a new one, as
shown in Figure 5-6:

Figure 5-6 Virtual Machine recovery setting panel

Further, note that the Recovery Method is set to Instant Recovery.

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Note: When recovering VMs, two recovery methods are supported:


򐂰 Instant Recovery: Instant recovery is the fastest method to get the VM(s) up and
running. In Instant Recovery, the Data Protect cluster creates a writeable snapshot of
the immutable snapshot(s) selected in step 3, and mounts it as a temporary NFS
datastore(s) in the target VMware environment. The VMs present in this datastore are
then registered to the target vCenter and powered on. After the last VM in the recovery
job is powered on, Data Protect then orchestrates the storage vMotion of the VMs from
the NFS datastore to the target datastore. Once the vMotion tasks complete, the Data
Protect cluster unmounts the temporary datastore. The benefit of Instant Recovery is
that the VMs being recovered can be powered on before any data is moved from the
backup to the target datastore. Instant Recovery provides the foundation for Instant
Mass Restore, which we will cover in more detail in section 5.1.2, “Instant Mass
Restore” on page 76.
򐂰 Copy Recovery: Copy Recovery is the fastest method to get the VM files out of the
backup system and back to the VMware datastore. It will first copy the VM files from the
Data Protect cluster to the VMware target datastore, and only once the VM files are fully
restored to the datastore can the VM(s) be powered on. To reiterate, Copy Recovery
provides a faster method to move the files back to the datastore than Instant Recovery,
but the VMs cannot be powered up until the VM files are fully restored.

When performing a VM restore and Original Location is selected, Data Protect offers
multiple options for how to handle existing VMs in the original location:
򐂰 None: VM recovery will fail if there is an existing VM in the recovery location.
򐂰 Overwrite Existing VM:
– For an Instant Recovery, the existing VM will first be deleted from the target system
prior to the restoration
– For a Copy Recovery, Data Protect will attempt a differential restore, where only the
blocks that differ between the existing VM and the backup copy are restored from the
backup. This can result in a faster overall restore time. An example use case for
differential restore is recovering from a large-scale operating system patching error.
򐂰 Keep Existing VM: The existing VM will be powered off and renamed prior to the
restoration.
6. Finally, make note of the available Recovery Options shown in Figure 5-7:

Figure 5-7 VM Recovery Options panel

Network:
򐂰 For recovery to the Original Location, default value is Detached - all VMs will be
powered on detached from any network. If Attached is selected, all VMs will be powered
on attached to their original virtual network. Additionally, selecting Attached unlocks the

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Start Connected option. If Start Connected is selected, the VMs will connect to the
original network(s) when the VMs reboot. If unselected, the VMS will not be connected to
any virtual networks up reboots.

Note: When recovering to the Original Location, Data Protect will recover the original
MAC address for VMs that had manual MAC addresses at the time of the backup. If the
VMs were set to have automatically generated MAC addresses at the time of the backup,
the recovered VMs will have the same setting.

򐂰 For recovery to a New Location, default value is Detached - all VMs will be powered on
detached from any network. If Attached is selected, a drop-down menu is displayed,
allowing you to select the destination virtual network to attach the VMs to. This network
will be attached to all the VMs in the recovery job. To override this, you can click the Add
Network Override link and select separate network settings for each VM in the recovery
job.
򐂰 Additionally, selecting Attached unlocks the Start Connected and Preserve MAC
Address options. If Start Connected is selected, the VMs will be connect to the selected
network when the VMs reboot. If unselected, the VMs will not be connected to any virtual
networks up reboots. If Preserve MAC Address is selected, VMs that were set to have
manual MAC addresses will be restored with their original MAC addresses.

Note: When recovering to a New Location, VMs that were set to have automatically
generated MAC addresses at the time of the backup, the recovered VMs will have manual
MAC addresses.

Rename:
򐂰 Allows you to enter a prefix and/or suffix to the names of the recovered VMs.

Power State:
򐂰 Default value is Power On - VMs will be powered on upon restoration.

Leverage SAN Transport for Copy Recovery:


򐂰 Instruct Data Protect to leverage SAN transport for datastores that reside on Fibre
Channel (FC) or iSCSI-based storage arrays. Enable this option to enable SAN transport
mode over FC or iSCSI for recovery of VMware VMs.

Note: SAN transport over FC requires that FC is configured and zoned between the Data
Protect cluster and the target ESX host(s).

Continue on Error:
򐂰 Default value is No - the recovery job will fail upon the first error recovering a VM. If Yes is
selected, the protection job will continue to run even if errors are encountered.

Cluster Interface:
򐂰 Only available for Instant Recoveries. Default value is Auto Select - the Data Protect
cluster will automatically select the correct interface group to use for the recovery. To
manually select the desired Interface Group, click the Cluster Interface row, disable the
Auto Select slider and use the Interface Group drop-down menu to select the desired
Interface Group to use for the recovery job.

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Task Name:
򐂰 Optionally, change the default name of the recovery job.
7. Click Recover to initiate the restore job. You will be presented with a Recovery Summary
screen, as shown in Figure 5-8:

Figure 5-8 Recovery summary panel

8. If the details look correct, click the Start Recovery button to initiate the restore. You will be
redirected to the Data Protection > Recoveries page, where you will see the restore job
running, as shown in Figure 5-9:

Figure 5-9 Recoveries details panel

9. Click on the recovery job to load its details, as shown in Figure 5-10:

Figure 5-10 Recovery job details panel

10.Click the Show Subtasks button to view the log of the recovery job. An example of the log
is shown in Figure 5-11:

Figure 5-11 Recovery job log details

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11.The figure Figure 5-12 on page 76 shows the successful completion status of the recovery
job:

Figure 5-12 Recovery job completion status details

12.Further, as shown in Figure 5-13, we can confirm in vCenter that our VMs have been
successfully restored:

Figure 5-13 Restored VMs displayed in Vcenter

Now that we have explored the fundamental capabilities of VMware virtual machine
restoration, we will examine how Data Protect leverages these capabilities, along with its
scale-out architecture, to support large scale, raid restore of virtual machines.

5.1.2 Instant Mass Restore


In this section you select the VMs to recover in the Recover task. In a recover task, you can
select multiple VMs to restore. The ability to select more than one VM in a recovery task is
called Instant Mass Restore (IMR). With IMR, you can use the Cohesity NFS views as the
datastore, allowing the recovery process to happen much faster or instantly and
circumventing the requirement of restoring the VMs to the original datastore before booting.

Before you can recover Protected Objects (VMs), a Snapshot must exist.

Key to recovery from a large-scale data corruption incident or other major intrusion is the
ability to respond to the need to bring the business services back online quickly. The ability to
select multiple VMs in a recovery task, and to recover them leveraging the Instant Recovery
method discussed above in <link to Recovery Method description above>, is called Instant
Mass Restore (IMR). In an Instant Mass Restore, the IBM Defender Data Protect cluster
performing the recovery follows the same process as described above, but allows for Instant
Recovery at scale. IMR facilitates the rapid recovery of hundreds or even thousands of VMs
that is often required in cyber incidents.

The chart below details the use cases tested during a Data Protect Proof of Concept. It
illustrates a variety of different recovery scenarios, including multiple types of large-scale
restoration in a VMware environment. This set of use cases highlight the power of IBM
Storage Defender Data Protect to drive workload restoration at scale and speed.

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Figure 5-14 Instant Mass Restore PoC details table

The example depicted here highlights the recovery of 200 virtual machines.

Figure 5-15 Instant Mass Restore finished restore example

5.2 File or Folder Recovery


In addition to full virtual machine restoration, Data Protect provides the ability to recover files
and folders from a virtual machine backup, to either their original location or to a new location.
Alternatively, you can download the desired files and or folders contained in a Data Protect
backup directly via the Data Protect UI (DMS). Optionally, you can instruct Data Protect to
preserve the file and folder permissions and attributes at the time of the backup.

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5.2.1 Indexing and Recovery


Fundamental to the ability of Data Protect to offer granular, file and folder level restore
capabilities from VMware virtual machine backups is filesystem indexing. Data Protect, by
default, attempts to index the filesystems of the Windows and Linux VMs that it backs up.
While indexing is an optional parameter for VM backups, most users will find great benefit in
leaving it enabled. Doing so allows Data Protect to include this index data in a global catalog,
allowing Defender users to leverage a single search interface for recovering all the file data
across their estate.

Note: Data protect supports recovering files and/or folders from Windows VMs to Windows
VMs, and from Linux VMs to Linux VMs only.

File recovery and instant volume mount from a Data Protect backup of a Windows VM with
Windows deduplication enabled for one or more volumes is only supported when the target
Windows machines had deduplication installed. (Deduplication does not need to be
enabled on the target machined volume(s), only installed.)

5.2.2 Recovering Files or Folders


Follow these steps to recover files or folders with Defender Data Protect:
1. Navigate to Data Protection > Recoveries, as shown in Figure 5-16:

Figure 5-16 Storage Defender Data Protection menu

2. Then use the Recover menu on the top right of the Recoveries page to select Recover >
Virtual Machines > Files or Folders, as shown in Figure 5-17:

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Figure 5-17 VM Recovery drop down menu

3. In the New Recovery window, enter a wildcard search term to search for individual files or
folders, as shown in Figure 5-18:

Figure 5-18 VM New Recovery file search panel

Note: The Files and Folders search feature allows you to search across all Protection
Groups within a DMS instance. In our example, the search term Redbooks returns three
file results from three separate Protection Groups.

A single File/Folder Recovery job can restore multiple files and/or folders that were
backed up as part of the same Protection Group. Use separate File/Folder Recovery
jobs to recover files and/or folders backed up in separate Protection Groups.

4. Check the box for your desired file(s) or folder(s), to add the item(s) to the Recovery Cart.
Note that selecting an item the search results will immediately filter the search results to
only show items from the same Protection Group and Recovery Point, as shown in
Figure 5-19 on page 80:

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Figure 5-19 Files selection for recovery example

5. Optionally, click the pencil icon to select an earlier version. (Again, Data Protect defaults
to the latest backup copy.)

Note: The option to select an earlier recovery point is only available when a single file is
selected for recovery.

6. Optionally, click the link to the source VM, in our example sts-pok-w2k3-01. Figure 5-20
shows how to browse the index of backed up files from this VM and select additional files
and/or folders for recovery:

Figure 5-20 Browsing indexed data for a specific VM

Note the Browse on Indexed Data slider at the top of the page. By default, Data Protect
presents an indexed (cached) representation of the filesystem of this VM at the date and time
of the selected Recovery Point shown at the top right. Browsing on indexed data allows for
better search performance, only displaying files and folders that are indexed. Hidden paths,
as well as manually excluded paths are not shown in this mode.

Flipping the slider off will trigger Data Protect empty the Recovery Cart, mount the selected
backup internally, and refresh the file browser to show all the files that are available in the
selected Recovery Point.

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Clicking the Recovery Point timestamp allows you to select an alternate Recovery Point, as
shown in Figure 5-21:

Figure 5-21 Alternative recovery point selection

7. In our example, we click the Cancel button on the Recovery Point selection pop-up
window, then click Cancel again to exit the file browser and return to the original
Recovery Cart, as shown in Figure 5-22:

Figure 5-22 Return to recovery cart

8. From the original Recovery Cart, we can select either:

򐂰 Next: Recover Options to proceed with recovering the selected item(s)

or
򐂰 Download Files to download a zip archive of the selected items directly through the
browser
9. In our example, we choose Next: Recover Options. The New Recovery page now
displays a summary of the selected items at the top of the page (Again, click the pencil
icon to edit the items selected for recovery) followed by additional recovery parameters
and options, as show in Figure 5-23 on page 82:

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Figure 5-23 New recovery summary page

The Recover To field allows you select either the Original Server or a New Server as the
target for the file/folder restore. When the default selection, Original Server, is selected, the
Recover to Original Path slider is set to On, as shown in Figure 5-24:

Figure 5-24 Recovery to original location settings panel

To recover the item(s) to an alternate path on the Original Server, flip the slider Off and enter
the desired path for restoration.

To recover the item(s) to a New Server, select the New Server radio button, then use the
Source and Target drop-down menus to select the destination ESX host or vCenter server
and Target VM. Optionally, the Source drop-down menu allows for the registration of a new
Source server "on the fly." In our example, we select the already-registered vCenter server
sts-pok-vcenter-1.ww.pbm.ihost.com as our Source, then select virtual machine
sts-pok-rhel8-10-8 as the Target for restore, as shown in Figure 5-25 on page 83:

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Figure 5-25 Recovery to new server settings panel

Note: The use of the term Server on this panel, whether Original or New, can be a bit
misleading. Here Server denotes the Virtual Server (VM) to which you want to recover the
item(s).

The use of the term Server here, whether Original or New, can be a bit misleading. Here
Server denotes the Virtual Server (VM) to which you want to recover the item(s).

Additionally, Source is used here in the context of registered Data Protect protection
sources. When New Server is selected, the Source drop-down menu loads the registered
VMware data protection sources in this DMS instance (vCenter Servers and/or ESX hosts)
and the Target drop-down menu dynamically loads based on the selected Source,
allowing you to select the target VM to which you want to recover the item(s).

Regardless of whether the item(s) are recovered to the Original Server or a New Server, we
must select the Restore Method. The available methods are:

򐂰 Auto Deploy Cohesity Agent: Data Protect will deploy the Cohesity agent using the
supplied credentials, then recover the item(s) to the Target VM leveraging the agent.
򐂰 Use Existing Cohesity Agent: Data Protect will leverage the existing Cohesity agent on
the Target VM to restore the items.

Note: Recovering VMware files and/or folders with the IBM Storage Defender Data Protect
agent requires that VMware tools be installed and running on the Target VM.

򐂰 Use VMware Tools: Data Protect will leverage VMware Tools to perform the recovery of
the item(s). VMware Tools must be installed and running on the Target VM.
10.In our example, we know that VMware Tools are already installed on the original, source
VM, so in Figure 5-26 on page 84 we select Original Server, Use VMware Tools, enter
user credential to access the Target VM, and select Recover to Original Path:

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Figure 5-26 Recovery to original location settings panel

Data Protect offers the following additional Recovery Options for VMware file and folder
recovery:

򐂰 Overwrite Existing File/Folder: Default value, No; If Yes, existing files may be
overwritten as part of the recovery job.
򐂰 Preserve File/Folder Attributes: Default value, Yes; By default, Data Protect will
preserve the ACLs, permissions, and timestamps for all recovered item(s). If No, the ACLs
and permissions are not preserved.

Note: When recovering both folders and files, folders will receive new timestamps, while
files will be restored with their timestamps from the time of the backup. For file-only
recovery, the files will receive new timestamps.

򐂰 Continue on Error: Default value, Yes; The recovery job will upon the first error
encountered. If set to No, the recovery will continue when errors are encountered.
򐂰 Cluster Interface: Default value is Auto Select - the Data Protect cluster will
automatically select the correct interface group to use for the recovery. To manually select
the desired Interface Group, click the Cluster Interface row, disable the Auto Select
slider and use the Interface Group drop-down menu to select the desired Interface
Group to use for the recovery job.
򐂰 Task Name: Optionally, change the default name of the recovery job.
11.To initiate the recovery job, click the Recover button. You will be redirected to the Data
Protection > Recoveries page, where you will see the restore job running, as shown in
Figure 5-27:

Figure 5-27 Recoveries status dashboard

12.Click on the recovery job to load its details, as shown, in Figure 5-28 on page 85:

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Figure 5-28 File recovery job details panel

13.Click the Show Subtasks button to view the log of the recovery job:

Figure 5-29 File recovery log details

14.While the recovery process is running, you can monitor the Recoveries panel to see the
status of the job. Figure 5-30 shows the successful completion status of the recovery job:

Figure 5-30 Recovery job status panel

5.3 Virtual Disk Recovery


Defender Data Protect supports the recovery of VMware VM virtual disks from snapshot
backups that it has created. For more information on creating VMware VM backups with Data
Protect, see 4.2.3, Configuration of a Data Protect Protection Group. Recovery can be to
the original VM or to a different VM registered within the same vCenter.

The process of virtual disk recovery consists of the following steps:

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1. Data Protect creates a writable clone of the selected VMDK file from the selected
Recovery Point and mounts it to the target ESX host(s) as a temporary NFS datastore
from the Data Protect cluster.
2. Data Protect attaches the new VMDK virtual disk(s) to the target VM and initiates a
storage vMotion of the new VMDK from the temporary datastore to the target datastore.
3. The temporary datastore is automatically removed upon vMotion completion.

Note: After virtual disk recovery competes, it may be necessary to perform additional,
operating system-level actions to make the recovered disks online and available.

5.3.1 Recovering Virtual Disks


Follow these steps to recover VMware virtual disk with Defender Data Protect:
1. Navigate to Data Protection > Recoveries, as shown in Figure 5-31:

Figure 5-31 Storage Defender Data Protection menu

2. Then use the Recover menu on the top right of the Recoveries page to select Recover >
Virtual Machines > Virtual Disks as shown in Figure 5-32:

Figure 5-32 Virtual disks recovery option

3. In the New Recovery window, as shown in Figure 5-33, enter a wildcard search term to
search for the virtual machine whose disks you want to recover, then select the desired

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VM. Note that Data Protect defaults to the most recent Recovery Point. Again, optionally
use the pencil icon to select an earlier Recovery Point. In our example, we leave the
default Recovery Point selected and click the Next: Recover Options button:

Figure 5-33 Virtual disk recovery search panel

The New Recovery screen (Figure 5-34) will now show a summary of the selected source
virtual machine and associated Recovery Point. The Recover To option defaults to Original
Location. Select New Location to restore the virtual disk(s) to a different VM:

Figure 5-34 Virtual disks recovery options panel

4. Next, check the box(es) for the disk(s) that you want to recover (Figure 5-35 on page 88),
and for each disk, select the recovery type:

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Figure 5-35 Virtual disks recovery panel disk selection

The available Recovery Types are:


򐂰 Overwrite Original Disk: The original disk will be overwritten in the original datastore with
the recovered virtual disk. It is recommended that VM disk IO be quiesced prior to
performing the disk recovery.
򐂰 Recover as a new Disk: The recovered virtual disk will be attached to the target VM as a
new virtual disk. You must chose this option if the virtual disk has been deleted from the
VM since the time of the backup.

If Recover as a new Disk is selected, you must select a target datastore for the new disk with
the Datastore drop-down menu, as show in Figure 5-36:

Figure 5-36 Virtual disk recovery panel ‘Recovery as a new disk option’ panel

Note: If recovery fails with Overwrite Original Disk selected, the original disk will not be
available. If this occurs, retry the recovery to restore the disk(s).
For recoveries where one or more disks will be overwritten, Data Protect will automatically
powered off the target VM prior to recovery. Optionally, the target VM can be powered on
automatically after successful recovery.

5. In our example (Figure 5-37 on page 89), we select Original Location and choose
Recover as a new Disk, then select sts-pok-ds-01-general as the target datastore:

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Figure 5-37 Virtual disk recovery options panel

Virtual Disk Recovery Options are:


򐂰 Power State: Default value is Off - VMs will not be powered off prior to restoration
򐂰 Cluster Interface: Default value is Auto Select - the Data Protect cluster will
automatically select the correct interface group to use for the recovery. To manually select
the desired Interface Group, click the Cluster Interface row, disable the Auto Select
slider and use the Interface Group drop-down menu to select the desired Interface
Group to use for the recovery job.
򐂰 Task Name: Optionally, change the default name of the recovery job.
6. Click the Power State row under Recovery Options (Figure 5-38). Note that the value
changes from Off to a slider labeled Power off VMs before Restore:

Figure 5-38 Recovery options panel power options

7. Flip the Power off VMs before Restore slider on (Figure 5-39). Note that there is now an
option to Power on VMs after Restore:

Figure 5-39 Recovery options panel power options

Note: The Power State options can be helpful when recovering virtual disks to VMs that do
not support "Hot Add" disk operations.

8. In our example (Figure 5-40 on page 90), we revert to the default Power State options and
click Recover. The browser redirects to the Data Protection > Recoveries page, and we
can see our virtual disk restore job running:

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Figure 5-40 Recoveries status panel

9. Click the Show Subtasks button (Figure 5-41) to view the recovery job logs (Figure 5-42):

Figure 5-41 Recovery details panel

Figure 5-42 Recovery job log details

10.Figure 5-43 shows our virtual disk recovery job has completed successfully:

Figure 5-43 Recoveries job summary panel

5.4 Instant Volume Mount


Instant Volume Mount (IVM) allows selected backup volume(s) to be made available to a
target server target without the need for any automated movement of the backup data from
the Data Protect system. Common use cases include granular recovery of Microsoft SQL,
Exchange and Sharepoint databases, where the database/application admin can then
perform the desired granular recovery operations manually or via scripting. Instant Volume
Mount supports mounting to the original VM or a new VM.

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Note: Instant Volume Mount is only available for backup volumes stored locally on the
Data Protect cluster. In other words, Instant Volume Mount is not available from
cloud/archive backup copies.

The default path of the recovered file or instantly mounted volume is


<Cluster_IP_address>/<Cloned view name>\<PATH>. In order to access this location, both
the target for the IVM and the Data Protect cluster must be in the same Active Directory
domain.

5.4.1 Instant Volume Mounting a VMware virtual disk

Follow these steps to recover VMware virtual disk with Defender Data Protect:
1. Navigate to Data Protection > Recoveries, as shown in Figure 5-44:

Figure 5-44 Storage Defender Data Protection menu

2. Then use the Recover menu on the top right of the Recoveries page to select Recover >
Virtual Machines > Instant Volume Mount as shown in Figure 5-45:

Figure 5-45 Instant Volume Mount option

3. In the New Recovery window, as shown in Figure 5-46, enter a wildcard search term to
search for the virtual machine whose disks you want to instantly mount, then select the
desired VM. Note that Data Protect defaults to the most recent Recovery Point. Again,

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optionally use the pencil icon to select an earlier Recovery Point. In our example, we
leave the default Recovery Point selected and click the Next: Recover Options button:

Figure 5-46 Recovery point options panel

4. The New Recovery screen will now show a summary of the selected source virtual
machine and associated Recovery Point, as shown in Figure 5-47. The Select Volumes
slider defaults to Off, allowing the selection of one or more specific volumes for instant
mounting in the drop-down menu. Optionally, flip the slider to select all of the volumes that
were backed up with this VM at the time of the selected Recovery Point:

Figure 5-47 Instant Volume mount options panel

5. The Recover To option defaults to Original Location. Select New Location to instantly
mount the selected virtual disk(s) to a different VM.

Additional Recovery Options for VMware Instant Volume Mount are:


򐂰 Read-Only: Default value is Off - the selected volumes will be mounted to the target VM in
read-only mode.
򐂰 Cluster Interface: Default value is Auto Select - the Data Protect cluster will
automatically select the correct interface group to use for the recovery. To manually select
the desired Interface Group, click the Cluster Interface row, disable the Auto Select
slider and use the Interface Group drop-down menu to select the desired Interface
Group to use for the recovery job.
򐂰 Task Name: Optionally, change the default name of the recovery job.

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6. In our example (Figure 5-48), we choose to recover the F drive to a New Location:

Figure 5-48 Instant volume mount recover to options

7. The Figure 5-49 below shows our Instant Volume Mount job has been successfully
initiated:

Figure 5-49 Recoveries job log panel

Once the mount job completes the volume will be mounted and accessible on the target VM

5.4.2 Teardown of a Mounted Volume


Once the mounted volume is no longer needed, it can unmounted from the target host by
selecting Teardown from the top-right menu, as shown below:

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Figure 5-50 Recovery panel Teardown option selection

Then click to Teardown to confirm that you want to unmount the volume:

Figure 5-51 Teardown recovery object confirmation dialog

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Chapter 6. Integrating IBM Defender Data


Protection with IBM Storage
Protect
In this chapter, we demonstrate how to configure IBM Storage Defender Data Protect to send
archives to an external S3 target using the S3 agent. The target in this example is a Storage
Protect server. This type of configuration provides a Glacier-like S3 to tape archive for longer
term retention use cases. We will show use cases, examples how to setup a DP Policy and a
protection group along with an example data retrieval.

This chapter contains the following sections:


򐂰 6.1, “Data Protection Overview” on page 96
򐂰 6.2, “Deployment Exercise Overview” on page 97
򐂰 6.3, “Create an S3 Bucket on the IBM Storage Protect Server” on page 97
򐂰 6.4, “Capture Access Credentials on the SP server” on page 101
򐂰 6.5, “Register the S3 Bucket as External Target on Data Protect Cluster” on page 101
򐂰 6.6, “Create Polices to Archive Data to The S3 Bucket” on page 104
򐂰 6.7, “Monitoring the Protection status” on page 109
򐂰 6.8, “Retrieve from the S3 External Storage” on page 111
򐂰 6.9, “Additional Process Monitoring Examples” on page 115

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6.1 Data Protection Overview


IBM Storage Defender Data Protect (DP) provides support for sending data to external S3
targets. These S3 external target resources can be located in a public cloud, private cloud or
on-premises S3 capable storage devices. For example an S3 compatible object storage on
the cloud or S3 object storage on-prem (ICOS), allowing for configurations which fit a wide
range of customer needs and requirements.

Figure 6-1 Workload protection with Archive to S3 Storage example

Note: DP archive to Storage Protect (SP) tape currently is intended for weekly or
monthly archives. Each archive is a full copy of the protection group from DP to
SP. Incremental functionality for archives is not yet available.

S3 Offload Use Cases and Scenarios


򐂰 The IBM Storage Protect Server S3 agent can be set up for use by other components in
the IBM Storage Defender stack. For example, it is possible to use the SP S3 Agent to
provide an object storage bucket for Data Protect and IBM Storage Fusion.
򐂰 A requirement is in place to have a weekly copy that goes to tape, following the 3-2-1 rule.
The S3 Archive to tape function protects a FULL copy of the specified data by creating a
physical air gap once the data is sent to tape. The Archive copy/s can also be on a
separate device and can be in a separate location on separate media for added protection.
򐂰 Data is protected by the DP cluster with options to replicate the data so there are two
copies for DR and Resiliency. A weekly third Archive copy to tape can be added for
air-gapping and longer-term retention, often needed for legal requirements.
򐂰 A great use for existing tape libraries in the environment. When an archive copy is sent to
the SP S3 bucket, the data is cached on the SP S3 cold data cache pool. It is then
migrated to physical tape volumes that can be managed onsite or offsite for longer term
retention needs. This cold data cache pool is helpful in reducing the number of tape drives
required to meet the desired data throughput. Additionally, this disk cache will be used for
restores.

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Compatibility Details
A complete list of S3 storage compatibility for DP is available in the DP Support pages. At the
writing of this book, the current release of DP is v7.1 and SP is 8.1.20. To find the latest
information on IBM Storage Defender Data Protect see the following link:

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/storage-defender/base?topic=storage-defender-data-prot
ect

6.2 Deployment Exercise Overview


In this section, we take a closer look at how the IBM Storage Protect S3 Agent integration is
set up for use with DP.

Figure 6-2 Leverage S3 compatible storage with IBM Storage Defender Data Protect

This diagram (Figure 6-2) shows S3 Storage options on the top left, with the IBM Data
Management Server (DMS) at the bottom. In the middle is a timeline which shows the steps
required to complete this integration.

These details for setup are covered in the sections below:


1. Create S3 Bucket on the SP Server
2. Capture the access credentials on the SP server
3. Register the S3 bucket as external target on DP cluster
4. Archive to the S3 bucket
5. Recover from the S3 bucket

6.3 Create an S3 Bucket on the IBM Storage Protect Server


These steps can be performed on a server with either IBM Storage Protect or IBM Defender
Storage Protect licensing. Storage Protect servers need to be version 8.1.20 or higher.

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How to Set up the SP server to receive DP archives


The command below will create the ‘coldcache’ storage pool (a FILE type device class) for
the cold-data-cache storage pool. The nextstgpool option is used to define the tape storage
pool where archives will be stored. In the command below the tape pool is defined as
coldtapestg.

Note: When creating a cache, ensure that it is big enough for the largest retrieve that may
need to be done, as well as additional space for any additional incoming archives which
may need to be processed.

This Storage pool is used as a temporary cache location for the Data Protect (DP) archives
before migrating them to the tape pool.

For recovery, the IBM DP Protection Group is brought back from this tape storage and
placed in the cold-data-cache storage pool where it is held for 7 days. Because of this, the
size of DP groups and size of the VM’s protected will need to be taken into consideration
when determining the amount storage pool space required for successful archive and
retrieve operations.

Example 6-1 Define a coldcache storage pool on the SP server


TSMSRC> define stgpool coldcache stgt=colddatacache nextstgpool=coldtapestg
directory=/sp-src/coldcache migpro=3
Migpro=# is the number of tape drives used

ANR2200I Storage pool COLDCACHE defined (device class COLDCACHEDEVCLASS)

Create the S3 Storage Agent:


Next, use the define server command to create the S3 agent. In the example below the
server is defined as ‘s3-dp’.

Example 6-2 Define the Storage Agent which will connect to the S3 enabled storage
TSMSRC> def server s3-dp hla=<ip-address-of-SP-server> lla=9000 objecta=yes

ANR4601I A configuration file for the object agent was created in the instance
directory and is ready to set up. To configure and start a service for object
agent S3-DP, run the following command: "/opt/tivoli/tsm/server/bin/spObjectAgent"
service install "/sp-src/sp_home/S3-DP/spObjectAgent_S3-DP_1500.config"
ANR1660I Server S3-DP defined successfully.

After running the define server command, run the command in the resulting ANR4601I
message as root from the host command line.

Example 6-3 Service install command execution


"/opt/tivoli/tsm/server/bin/spObjectAgent" service install
"/sp-src/sp_home/S3-DP/spObjectAgent_S3-DP_1500.config"

2023-11-20 14:14:37.558414 I | Installed and started system service as


spoa9000S3-DP.

From the SP Operations Center you can see the results of this of this command execution, as
well as view/copy the certificate information from the Servers/Object Agent drill down.
(Figure 6-3 on page 99)

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Figure 6-3 Operations Center GUI showing Object Agent Configuration details

From the Storage Protect command line, define the object domain.
In the example below, the standard pool ‘s3-fusion’ is a container storage pool used for
Fusion backups and the coldcache pool is the name of the pool we created in the first
Example 6-1 on page 98. The archives from Data Protect will first land in this coldcache pool
then auto migrate to the nextstgpool which is set to ‘coldtapestg’.

Example 6-4 Define objectdomain command


TSMSRC> define objectdomain S3-DP-fusion standardpool=s3-fusion coldpool=coldcache

ANR1500I Policy domain S3-DP-FUSION defined.

ANR1510I Policy set STANDARD defined in policy domain S3-DP-FUSION.

ANR1520I Management class STANDARD defined in policy domain S3-DP-FUSION, set


STANDARD.

ANR1520I Management class COLD defined in policy domain S3-DP-FUSION, set


STANDARD.

ANR1530I Backup copy group STANDARD defined in policy domain S3-DP-FUSION, set
STANDARD, management class STANDARD.

ANR1530I Backup copy group STANDARD defined in policy domain S3-DP-FUSION, set
STANDARD, management class COLD.

ANR1538I Default management class set to STANDARD for policy domain S3-DP-FUSION,
set STANDARD.

ANR1554W DEFAULT Management class STANDARD in policy set S3-DP-FUSION STANDARD


does not have an ARCHIVE copygroup: files will not be archived by default if this
set is activated.

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ANR1514I Policy set STANDARD activated in policy domain S3-DP-FUSION.

Register the object client node on your SP server.


In the following example the register node command to register an node on the SP server to
store the archive data. This command will use the same domain name that was used in the
previous Example 6-4 on page 99.

Example 6-5 Registering the node command


TSMSRC> reg node spta-pok-dp-03 type=objectclient domain=s3-dp-fusion

ANR2470I The new authentication credentials for object client node SPTA-POK-DP-03
are: Access Key ID: ********************, Secret Access Key:
****************************************.

ANR2060I Node SPTA-POK-DP-03 registered in policy domain S3-DP-FUSION.

ANR4200I The password for node SPTA-POK-DP-03 is now case sensitive.

Create the S3 bucket used by Data Protect to send archives to Storage Protect.
On the IBM Storage Protect server, download and installed the MinIO client utility from link
below. The rpm name used in this example is mcli-20231115224558.0.0.x86_64.rpm. This is
the minimum version of the RPM that should be used, later versions that are available can be
found at the following link:

https://dl.min.io/client/mc/release/

As root, from the directory where the .rpm file is located, run the ‘mcli alias set
command:
alias-name end-point access-key secret-key --insecure’

Example 6-6 setting the mcli alias


mcli alias set s3-dp {"C:\\Users\\014602649\\Downloads\\h"} --insecure

mcli: Configuration written to `/root/.mcli/config.json`. Please update your


access credentials.
mcli: Successfully created `/root/.mcli/share`.
mcli: Initialized share uploads `/root/.mcli/share/uploads.json` file.
mcli: Initialized share downloads `/root/.mcli/share/downloads.json` file.

Added `s3-dp` successfully.

Create the bucket.


In the following example s3-dp is the alias name from step Example 6-6 and s3-dp-minio is
the bucket name that was used.

As root, run the ’mcli mb alias-name/bucket-name‘ command

Example 6-7 S3 bucket creation

mcli mb s3-dp/s3-dp-minio –insecure

Bucket created successfully `s3-dp/s3-dp-minio`

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6.4 Capture Access Credentials on the SP server


The following information will be needed to register the SP bucket that was created to a new
DP External Target.

Have the following items available to continue with the next configuration steps:
򐂰 Bucket Name
򐂰 Access Key ID
򐂰 Secret Access Key
򐂰 Endpoint: the IP address of your SP server
򐂰 Port number: the LLA used on the define server in Example 6-2 on page 98

6.5 Register the S3 Bucket as External Target on Data Protect


Cluster

Note: Data Protect cluster needs to be version 7.1 or higher.

In DP, select AWS Signature version v4. For the External Target Name, the SP Node
registered in step Example 6-5 on page 100 will be used. This will be the SP node under
which the archives will be stored.

To register an External Target with your cluster, log in to the IBM Defender Dashboard and
perform the following actions:
1. Select the Data Management to launch the Data Management Service

Figure 6-4 Log in to the IBM Storage Defender dashboard, step 1

2. Select the Administrator level access to do configuration tasks on the cluster (Figure 6-5
on page 102)

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Figure 6-5 Log in to IBM Defender Data Management Service, step 2

3. Select the cluster resource, in the drop down for the cluster select:
a. Expand the Infrastructure option
b. Select External Targets
c. Click on the Add External Target button

Figure 6-6 Register an S3 External Target in Defender Data Protect, steps 1-3

In the Register External Target form:


4. Select Purpose (Archival).
5. Select Type (S3 Compatible)
6. Select Storage Class (Tape Based for Storage Protect S3 Agent to tape)
7. Enter Bucket Name.
8. Enter Access Key ID
9. Secret Access Key that you captured when you created your bucket.
10.Enter the Endpoint IP address or Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN)

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11.Enter the port number then, scroll down for additional options to continue the External
Target Registration, do not click register at this time.

Figure 6-7 Register an S3 External Target in Defender Data Protect, steps 4-11

Note: Do not include ‘http://’ or ‘https://’ in the mount path.

Secure Connection (HTTPS): Is enabled by default. If your S3 bucket is exposed via HTTP
and not HTTPS (that is, without SSL security), disable this option.

12.Set the AWS Signature version to Ver. 4


13.Set the External Target Name to be the Storage Protect node name.
14.If desired, set additional options for Encryption. See the note about the Key Management
Service type in the GUI panel. If you want to enable manual key management for extra
security, turn it on here.

Important: With this option enabled, a cluster must have the correct key to access data
from the archive. You can download the key file (only once) after you register your bucket.
This key is required when you use CloudRetrieve. If you do not have it, you will still be able
to recover data to its original cluster, but you will not be able to retrieve it onto a new
cluster (for example, in a disaster-recovery scenario).

15.Edit the setting for Compression if desired


16.Enable and configure the Bandwidth Throttling settings if desired. The upload and
download speeds can be throttled separately. Throttling can be enabled all the time or only
during specific days and times.
17.Click Register to complete form submission.

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Figure 6-8 Register an S3 External Target in Defender Data Protect, steps 12-17

The S3 bucket is now registered and available as an External Target in IBM Storage Defender
Data Protect. This target now can be selected when you create a Protection Policy for a Data
Protection Job.

6.6 Create Polices to Archive Data to The S3 Bucket


This section is split into two sub-sections as there are multiple policies that need to be defined
in Data Protect to correctly configure the system for this use case.

6.6.1 Create a Protection Policy for Archiving to the S3 Bucket


In IBM Data Protect, we will need to associate the external S3 target name from step 3 in the
example above to a Data Protection policy in IBM Defender Data Protect. (see: 3 on
page 102)

Create a Data Protection Policy by selecting the following GUI items:


1. Expand the Data Protection section
2. Select Policies
3. Click the button in the top right labeled ‘Create Policy’ to begin creating the new policy

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Figure 6-9 Create a Data Protection Policy for Archive to the S3 External target, steps 1-3

4. In the pop up dialog, select the ‘More Options’ button

Figure 6-10 Create a Data Protection Policy for Archive to the S3 External target, step 4

Provide and select the following items in the pop up dialog:


5. Name the new Policy
6. Disable the Data Lock option
7. Click Add Archive to show additional options

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Figure 6-11 Data Protection Policy for Archive to the S3 External target, steps 5-7

8. locate the Archive section


9. Set the desired external target, frequency and retention settings

Note: The recommended frequency is weekly or monthly as this will be a full copy.

10.Click Create to create the policy

Figure 6-12 Create a Data Protection Policy for Archive to the S3 External target, steps 8-10

6.6.2 Configure the Data Protection Group to use the Data Protection Policy
The Data Protection group will include the definition of the workloads to be protected (VMs in
this example) and the Data Protection Policy will then be applied to that group.

To configure the Data Protection Group select the following items in the GUI:
1. Expand Data Protection
2. Select the Protection section

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3. In the top right of the GUI, select the Protect drop down
4. Select the workload type you want to protect (in this example Virtual Machines)

Figure 6-13 Create a new Data Protection Policy using the S3 External target, steps 1-4

5. In the New Protection dialogue window, select Add Objects.

Figure 6-14 Virtual Machine New Protection options, step 5

6. Select the IP Address of the vCenter server


7. Search for VMs by using a name or pattern if desired
8. Select any desired ESX Hosts or individual VMs by name to be protected
9. Click Continue to complete this section

Note: Be aware of the number and size of VM’s in this Protection Group.

The selected VMs will be managed in the Protection Group for backup and recovery
operations. The sizing for the Storage Protect cold cache pool will be based on the ingest
and the restore pattern.

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Figure 6-15 Add Objects window steps 6-9

10.Enter a name for the new Protection Group


11.Select the Policy previously created for the weekly Archive to Storage Protect

Figure 6-16 Virtual Machines window steps 10-11

Scroll down to see more options and Additional Settings.


12.Review Settings for the Storage Domain
13.Review Additional Settings if needed
14.Click Protect to complete the configuration

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Figure 6-17 Virtual Machines window steps 12-14

Once this is completed, the Data Protection Group will be successfully associated with the
Data Protection Policy to protect the VMs in the group.

Note: The Archive to S3 is processed like a full backup job, not an incremental. The
current recommendation is to limit the frequency to a weekly or monthly archive to meet
retention needs.

6.7 Monitoring the Protection status


The status of Data Protection jobs are presented on the Protection panel. You can review the
overall status for multiple protection jobs at a glance in this panel, as well as click on the job
name to get additional details about the job.

The Data Protection Group Detail (Figure 6-18 on page 110) shows the daily VM backup
statistics as well as:
1. The SLA policy
2. The job status
3. A weekly archive to cloud – in this case, our S3 External Target.

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Figure 6-18 Reviewing the Protection Group details and status

In this example configuration, the daily backup with a weekly archive to S3 has been running
for a couple of weeks. In the example below a new VM was added to the Protection Group for
both the daily backup and weekly Archive job on 12/13/23.

The full VM backup was taken and we allowed the archive to S3 to be pushed after adding a
new Virtual Machine to the Protection Group.

Figure 6-19 Reviewing the activity of the S3 Agent node on the Storage Protect server

Using the Operations Center GUI, we can monitor the weekly activity of the S3 Agent node on
the Storage Protect server. A seen in Figure 6-19, there was an increase in the data being
stored as a new VM was added to the Data Protection group which uses the S3 archive
coldcache pool today. Additional details about coldcahce migration and volume status can be
seen using the operations center to run queries on the Storage Protect server as shown in
Figure 6-20 and Figure 6-21 on page 111.

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Figure 6-20 Screen shot from Storage Protect server showing migration from cold cache to cold tape

Figure 6-21 Screen shot from Storage Protect server showing volume status after migration

6.8 Retrieve from the S3 External Storage


With the flexible search tools available in IBM Storage Defender’s Data Protection utility, there
are multiple ways to find your desired data and create restore jobs for protected workloads.

6.8.1 Retrieve using Global Search


In the example below, we will use the Global Search bar to retrieve a VM from the S3 Archive.
1. Use the search bar and type the name of the VM
2. With the VM selected, you will see
򐂰 Search Results

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򐂰 Virtual Machine information


򐂰 Protection Group information

Figure 6-22 Recovery job steps 1-2

3. Use the Pencil icon to open the ‘Edit Recovery Point’ panel for the VM. The Edit Recovery
Points table will display the selection of the Snapshots available by timestamp and the
Location of the snapshot image.
4. Use the radio button to select the snapshot and click on the cloud to select the S3 location.
5. Click the Select Recovery Point button.

Figure 6-23 VM Recovery job steps 3-5

6. In the Recovery Method panel, select Copy Recovery


7. Scroll down and click on Recover to start the recovery job

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Figure 6-24 VM Recovery job steps 6-7

At this point the recovery of the selected backup data will proceed, and the VM data will be
pulled back from the S3 target to the cache storage pool on the SP server. The backup data is
then sent to the DP cluster and then recovered to the vCenter.

6.8.2 Retrieve using Recoveries Panel


Another way retrieve archived data is to use the Recoveries option under Data Protection in
the Data Protect GUI.

To retrieve data using the recoveries panel use the following steps:
1. In the left had side of the GUI, select Data Protection
2. Then select Recoveries
3. Once selected, click the Recover button to expand the menu details
4. From the Recovery button menu, pick Virtual Machines
5. Finally select the VMs option

Figure 6-25 VM Recovery job via Recoveries UI, steps 1-5

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6. Use the search bar in the panel to type the name of the desired VM
7. Select the VM using the check box
8. Use the pencil icon to select the Recovery Point and Location

Figure 6-26 VM Recovery job via Recoveries UI, steps 6-8

9. Recovery point
10.Location – click on the cloud to select the External S3 target
11.Click the Select Recovery Point button

Figure 6-27 VM Recovery job via Recoveries UI, steps 9-11

12.In the Virtual Machine panel, select the Recovery method for Copy Recovery
13.Scroll down and click on Recover

Figure 6-28 on page 115

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Figure 6-28 VM Recovery job steps 12-13

Once complete the recovery will begin to retrieve the archive data.

6.9 Additional Process Monitoring Examples


The following screen shots are examples related to checking the status of archive and
retrieval operations. This allows for users to conveniently monitor processes across the
environment, from the ESX server to the Data Protect cluster and to the Storage Protect S3
Agent.

Figure 6-29 Virtual Machine Recovery job in progress

On the Storage Protect server, the Q Process command is used to monitor the retrieve from
the cold tape pool to the cold cache pool. (Figure 6-30 on page 116)

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Figure 6-30 Query process output from the SP server showing the data copy to coldcache

The query volume command shows the Archived snapshot restored to the S3 cold cache
pool. The query session command shows the data has been sent from the Storage Protect
server to the Data Protect cluster. Figure 6-31

Figure 6-31 Storage Protect command line query volume and query session outputs for recovery
related coldcache data movement

The screenshots Figure 6-32 on page 117 and Figure 6-33 show examples of the DP
recovery log details for the recovery task.

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Figure 6-32 In Data Protect, click the Recovery job name to get the current status of the job
with Recovery Activity details and completion status

Figure 6-33 Use the vCenter Client to show the VM has been copied and powered on

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118 IBM Storage Defender: IBM Data Management Service and IBM Data Protect
To determine the spine width of a book, you divide the paper PPI into the number of pages in the book. An example is a 250 page book using Plainfield opaque 50# smooth which has a PPI of 526. Divided
250 by 526 which equals a spine width of .4752". In this case, you would use the .5” spine. Now select the Spine width for the book and hide the others: Special>Conditional
Text>Show/Hide>SpineSize(-->Hide:)>Set . Move the changed Conditional text settings to all files in your book by opening the book file with the spine.fm still open and File>Import>Formats the
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IBM Storage Defender: IBM Data SG24-8554-00
Management Service and IBM ISBN DocISBN
(1.5” spine)
1.5”<-> 1.998”
789 <->1051 pages
IBM Storage Defender: IBM Data SG24-8554-00
Management Service and IBM Data ISBN DocISBN
(1.0” spine)
0.875”<->1.498”
460 <-> 788 pages
SG24-8554-00
IBM Storage Defender: IBM Data Management Service and IBM ISBN DocISBN
(0.5” spine)
0.475”<->0.873”
250 <-> 459 pages
IBM Storage Defender: IBM Data Management Service and IBM Data Protect
(0.2”spine)
0.17”<->0.473”
90<->249 pages
(0.1”spine)
0.1”<->0.169”
53<->89 pages
To determine the spine width of a book, you divide the paper PPI into the number of pages in the book. An example is a 250 page book using Plainfield opaque 50# smooth which has a PPI of 526. Divided
250 by 526 which equals a spine width of .4752". In this case, you would use the .5” spine. Now select the Spine width for the book and hide the others: Special>Conditional
Text>Show/Hide>SpineSize(-->Hide:)>Set . Move the changed Conditional text settings to all files in your book by opening the book file with the spine.fm still open and File>Import>Formats the
Conditional Text Settings (ONLY!) to the book files.
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IBM Storage Defender: SG24-8554-00
IBM Data Management ISBN DocISBN
(2.5” spine)
2.5”<->nnn.n”
1315<-> nnnn pages
IBM Storage Defender: IBM Data SG24-8554-00
Management Service and IBM ISBN DocISBN
Data Protect
(2.0” spine)
2.0” <-> 2.498”
1052 <-> 1314 pages
Back cover
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SG24-8554-00

ISBN DocISBN

Printed in U.S.A.

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