Deploying the Acronis Agent for VMware from an OVF Template

Before you proceed to deploy one or more agents, take note of the following:

• Agent system requirements.

  By default, a virtual appliance is assigned 4 GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs, which is optimal and sufficient for most operations. It is recommended, however, to let an agent have 8 GB of RAM and 4 vCPUs to improve backup performance if the backup traffic exceeds 100 MB/s (in 10 Gbps networks, for example).

  As for storage, appliance virtual disks occupy no more than 6 GB. Thick or thin disk format does not matter as it does not affect the appliance performance.

• The number of agents.

  Even though one virtual appliance can protect the entire vSphere environment, the best practice is to deploy one virtual appliance per vSphere cluster (or per host, if there are no clusters). This makes for faster backups because the appliance can attach the backed-up disks by using the HotAdd transport and therefore direct the backup traffic from one local disk to another.

  You can use both the virtual appliance and Acronis Agent for VMware for Windows at the same time, as long as they are connected to the same vCenter Server or different ESXi hosts. Avoid connecting one agent to an ESXi directly and another to the vCenter Server which manages this ESXi.

  It is not recommended to use locally attached storage (i.e. storing backups on virtual disks added to the virtual appliance) if you have more than one agent.

• Disable automatic DRS for the agents.

  If the virtual appliance is deployed to a vSphere cluster, be sure to disable automatic vMotion for it. In the cluster DRS settings, enable individual virtual machine automation levels, and then set Automation level for the virtual appliance to Disabled.