Automatic Protection Fails to Detect and Protect VM

Virtual machine is not detected and automatically protected as part of automatic protection.

Symptom

Although a VM can be seen in hypervisor (vCenter/ESX or Hyper-V) by native client application (for example, vSphere Client or Hyper-V Manager), automatic protection does not detect and as a result the VM cannot be automatically protected.

Reasons

• The VM does not have a valid status in hypervisor. For example, Automatic Protection skips the VMs that have status of Disconnected, Orphaned or Inaccessible in vCenter/ESX .
• The VM is created by Arcserve UDP tasks such as Virtual Standby (VSB), Instant VM (IVM) or Assured Recovery (AR) (or is cloned from VSB/IVM/AR VM). Arcserve UDP intentionally skips such VMs due to following considerations:
• Arcserve UDP backing up VMs created by VSB/IVM/AR, without limitation may lead to the situation of infinite backup loop. For example, you use automatic protection to protect the whole ESX. In the backup plan, after adding a backup task you add a VSB task that creates VSB VM in the same ESX. Thus, after first backup a new VSB VM is created in the ESX. The new VSB VM is discovered by automatic protection and added into backup plan. Then, during next backup a new VSB VM of previous VSB VM is created and added into the backup plan. The process continues until the ESX storage runs out of free space.
• For Linux IVM/AR VM, unless storage migration converts to a normal VM, Arcserve UDP cannot back up the VM. The backup job can complete but backed up recovery point cannot be restored. This situation happens due to a technical limitation of Linux IVM implementation.

Solution

If you want to back up VSB/IVM/AR VMs, or the VMs are converted to independent VMs by clone or storage migration, follow the steps given below for vSphere VM and Hyper-V VM to let Automatic Protection detect and protect them.

For vSphere VM

1. Log into vSphere web client and locate the VM.
2. Power off the VM.
3. Right click on the VM and select Edit Settings from menu.
4. Select the VM Options tab and expand Advanced.
5. Click Edit Configuration.
6. On the Configuration Parameters dialog box, locate parameter with any of following names:
• VCM
• UDP_IVM
• UDP_ARVM
• UDP_IVM_LINUX
• UDP_VSBVM
• UDP_ARVM_LINUX
• UDP_ARIVM_LINUX
7. Clear value of the parameter, and click OK to save.

For Hyper-V VM

1. Log into Hyper-V host and open Hyper-V Manager.
2. Locate the VM.
3. Right click on the VM and select Settings from menu.
4. On the Settings dialog box, select Name in the left panel.
5. Remove all lines that start with following strings:
• VCM
• UDP_IVM
• UDP_ARVM
• UDP_IVM_LINUX
• UDP_VSBVM
• UDP_ARVM_LINUX
• UDP_ARIVM_LINUX
6. Click OK to save.