Data and workloads protection is a fundamental aspect that every administrator must consider to ensure data availability and BC. In each design, the protection of the infrastructure is important for having all services available with a working strategy to quickly recover vSphere components in case of failure.

This chapter will explain how to perform the setup of the backup and restore process for the ESXi host as well as the vCSA, to reduce the time required by the restore process, minimizing the service outage. Without a backup strategy, in case of failures, you will have to install and configure each ESXi host or vCSA from scratch, a time-consuming activity that creates service disruption and an extra workload.

When hosts and vCenter Servers are protected, running a VM plays a fundamental role in the infrastructure since they provide all the services to users. Ensuring VM protection and availability is the task assigned to the backup strategy design that must be reliable and scalable, and offer all the features required by modern data centers. This chapter will discuss some software backup solutions and the main features that you can use to manage data protection, thus ensuring the BC.

In this chapter we will cover the following topics:

• Backup and restore the ESXi host configuration
• How to protect the vCSA ensuring a quick restore process
• What are transport modes and how data is handled
• Understanding what backup solutions are available in the market to protect VM, and their main features
• Hyper-scale solutions