Data Protection Services (DPS) backups and VM disk tagging

On this page:

VM disk tags and levels of protection
- NoDisks
- OSDisk
- AllDisks
Backups
Get help
- Identify your VM tags
- Change your VM tags

VM disk tags and levels of protection

Tagging indicates the level of backup protection applied to a virtual machine (VM). Three tags may be applied to all attached disks on a VM: NoDisks, OSDisk, and AllDisks.

NoDisks

A VM that has the NoDisks tag applied to all attached disks will not receive any form of backup protection from DPS.

OSDisk

When the OSDisk tag is applied to hard disk 1, it will receive a weekly DR backup of the OS disk. Any additional data disks will be filtered from backup processing when they have the NoDisks tag.

Provides disaster recovery protection for your OS disk volume (labeled "Hard disk 1"; usually SCSI 0:0)
All other attached disks will be skipped and unavailable for recovery
Full backups of the OS Disk run once weekly per VM
Backups are kept for four weeks
Only eligible on VMs with a "Hard disk 1" size of 128 GB or smaller (larger sizes must either use AllDisks or opt-out of backups entirely)
OS Disk recovery is not available for self-service and requires assistance from the Storage and Virtualization team

AllDisks

A VM that has the AllDisks tag applied will receive daily backups of both the OS disk and all attached data disks. Backups for VMs in this category have a total of 31 days of backups available for recovery. The client can perform recovery at the file level, enabling granular recovery of a VM.

Provides full VM protection
Lets clients self-service file-level recoveries from any of the 31 days of available backups
Provides a full VM disaster recovery process that can be performed on either the entire VM, the OS disk volume (labeled "Hard disk 1"; usually SCSI 0:0), or any of the attached disks; this type of recovery is not available for self-service and requires assistance from the Storage and Virtualization team

Backups

Backup frequency and retention

VM disk tags determine backup frequency and data retention. For more, see Tags and levels of protection above.

Backups are configured to provide Intelligent Infrastructure clients with data protection and restoration as it pertains to business continuity. As such, the DPS environment cannot be used for longterm data archiving or as a deep store for data.

Change the backup schedule

The DPS environment does not have the means for clients to run off-schedule backups for a particular VM or groups of VMs. If you wish to protect your VM prior to a change, use the snapshot capabilities available through VMware.

Because of the way DPS backups work, UITS cannot change the backup schedule for an individual VM. It is important to note that because DPS does not use client resources to perform backups, it does not impact VMs the way most traditional backups can.

Backups for physical servers

At this time, only VMs that live within the Intelligent Infrastructure are eligible for DPS backups.

Get help

Identify your VM tags

For help finding which tag was applied to your VM, see Determine the type of data protection used for your Intelligent Infrastructure (II) virtual machines.

Change your VM tags

To change VM tags, log into the II Self-Service portal; see Access the Intelligent Infrastructure self-service portal. Follow the directions for how to Interact with a VM in the Intelligent Infrastructure (II) self-service portal, and select Change VM Backup Type as the type of action.

For more, see Enable AllDisks backups in Intelligent Infrastructure (II).