Protecting the workloads

The hosts and the vCenter Server are not the only components that need to be protected in your infrastructure. Once you have fired up your virtual infrastructure, the VM deployed in your environment must be protected against failures, data loss, and service disruptions.

Transport modes

Software backup solutions use different protocols called transport modes to retrieve VM data from the storage. The transport mode to use for backups depends on the design of the network and the storage architecture.

There are four main transport modes that are supported for handling data:

• Network Block Device (NBD): The ESXi host reads data from the storage and sends it to the application, across the network, using the NBD protocol. This mode can be used in any infrastructure configuration and is the simplest method to implement.
• Network Block Device Secure Socket Layer (NBDSSL): This is the same as NBD but uses SSL to encrypt the data passed over the TCP/IP connection.
• SCSI HotAdd: This...