Before you start

This appliance is a pre-configured virtual machine that you deploy in a Red Hat Virtualization/oVirt data center. The appliance contains a protection agent that enables you to administer cyber protection for all virtual machines in the data center.

System requirements for the agent

By default, the virtual machine with the agent uses 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB of RAM. These settings are sufficient for most operations but you can edit them in Red Hat Virtualization/oVirt Administration Portal. We recommend increasing these resources to 4 vCPUs and 8 GiB of RAM if the backup traffic bandwidth is expected to exceed 100 MB per second (for example, in 10-GBit networks), in order to improve backup performance.

The size of the appliance virtual disk is 8 GiB.

How many agents do I need?

One agent can protect the entire data center. However, you can have more than one agent in the data center if you need to distribute the backup traffic bandwidth load.

If you have more than one agent in the data center, the virtual machines are automatically distributed between the agents, so that each agent manages a similar number of machines.

Automatic redistribution occurs when the load imbalance among the agents reaches 20 percent. This may happen after you add or remove a machine or an agent. For example, you realize that you need more agents to help with throughput and you deploy an additional virtual appliance to the data center. The management server will assign the most appropriate machines to the new agent. The old agents' load will reduce. When you remove an agent, the machines assigned to the agent are redistributed among the remaining agents. However, this will not happen if an agent gets corrupted or is deleted manually from Red Hat Virtualization/oVirt Administration Portal. Redistribution will start only after you remove such an agent from the Cyber Protection service console.

To check which agent manages a specific machine

  1. In the Cyber Protection service console, click Devices, and then select oVirt.
  2. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the table, and under System, select the Agent check box.
  3. Check the name of the agent in the column that appears.

Limitations

The following operations are not supported for Red Hat Virtualization/oVirt virtual machines:

  • Application-aware backup

  • Running a virtual machine from a backup

  • Replication of virtual machines

  • Changed block tracking