Backup XCP-ng VMs

To create a XCP-ng backup job, you can get started from the VM Backup > Virtual Machines page by selecting target VM(s) and then click on Create new job, or you can get started from VM Backup > Backup page.

The New Backup Job wizard for Citrix opens. Please complete the wizard follow the below steps.

Step 1. Select VMs to Backup

Select VMs to be backed up from the VM List: select backup target column. The selected backup object(s) will be listed in the Selected backup object column.

If there’re VMs not showing, please click on Sync button to update and sync the VM list to Vinchin backup server.

By default, all virtual disks of the selected VMs will be all backed up, if you wish to exclude certain virtual disks of certain VMs from backing up, please click on the VM, all the virtual disks of the VM will be shown. By either selecting the virtual disk or not, you can choose to include or exclude the virtual disk from backing up.

If you want the newly added VMs to be automatically backed up by Vinchin, you can enable Auto-join backup. By selecting the entire virtualization platform, entire cluster, entire host or entire VM folder, any newly added or removed virtual machines within the selected object will be automatically included or excluded from the backup jobs.

As supplementary to the auto-join backup, VM Filter can be used to backup only specific VMs or to exclude specific VMs from the backup job with the user defined name prefix if needed.

When done selecting the target VMs to be backed up, please click on Next to continue.

Notice

You can only add VMs from the same virtual platform into a same job, if you have multiple virtual platforms, please create new jobs for the other virtual platforms separately.

Step 2. Select Backup Destination

General Strategy

Under the General Strategy tab, you can setup the backup Schedule, Throttling Policy, Data Storage Policy, Retention Policy and some other advanced options.

In the Select Strategy dropdown list, you can select a preconfigured strategy template, if you had created strategy templates, otherwise choose Customize Strategy. For how to create strategy templates, please refer to Strategy Templates.

To determine the backup window of this job, the Time Windows indicator can be a reference for you to determine in which time window the job should be scheduled.

In the Mode dropdown list, you can choose to setup a Backup as Scheduled job or a Once-off Backup job.

For a once-off backup job, the job will only run for once, and only full backup will be performed. You only have to appoint a time of when to start the backup job in the Start Time field.

For a scheduled backup job, you can schedule full backup only, full with incremental combination, full with differential combination and forever incremental backup methods. The recommended backup strategy is full with incremental combination.

Vinchin backup server will suggest a time to start the backup job, please change the start time as per your requirements. When the start time of a full backup is overlapped with an incremental backup, full backup will be taken at first priority, and the incremental backup will be taken on the next scheduled start time.

If you want to customize the schedules according to your requirements, you can click on the + icon to expand and customize the settings for either full backups or incremental backups.

For example, you can schedule full backups twice a month without repeating.

Then configure several incremental backups each day, by default incremental backup will run only for once each day, to run incremental backups several times a day, you can enable the Repeat option.

In the above example, full backups will run on day 1 and day 15 of each month, incremental backups will start to run at 0:00 every day and repeat every 4 hours till 23:00 of the day. This is just an example, you should configure the schedules per your requirements based on your actual virtual environments.

After configuring the time schedules of the backups, next you can configure the Throttling Policy, the throttling policy settings are optional, only if the backup jobs will bring network or I/O overload to your production environment, you can configure the throttling policy accordingly otherwise leave it unconfigured.

Data Storage Policy including Deduplication, Compression and Encryption of the backup data.

By enabling Data Deduplication and Data Compression, you can save the bandwidth and storage resources for transmitting and storing the backup data.

By enabling Data Encryption, the backup data will be encrypted and then stored into the backup storage. A password needs to be specified to secure the data encryption, when creating a VM restore job, password verification is required to perform VM restore.

Retention Policy can be used to define how long the backup data to be reserved in the backup storage, you can either define the retention policy with Number of Restore Points or Number of Days mode. Additionally, you can activate the advanced GFS Retention for your VM backups to apply long-term retention policy of some specific full restore points. For more information of how Vinchin's retention policy works, please refer to Retention Policy.

Advanced Strategy contains some advanced options for the VM backup job.

Standard Snapshot can be configured if the backup job includes multiple VMs, and it can be configured as Serial or Parallel. If serial, the snapshots will be taken one by one. If parallel, the snapshot requests will be simultaneously sent to the virtual platform. It’s not recommended to set parallel snapshot, as it may cause the production environment overload.

Pre-create Snapshot can be enabled to create the next VM’s disk snapshot while the previous VM is being transferred to the backup storage.

By specifying the number of Transfer Threads, you can enable multithreaded transmission to improve the processing speed of the backup job. The default value for multithreaded transmission is 3, even if you can set the value from 1 to 8, but usually 3 threads will be enough.

BitDetector can be enabled to exclude the swap file blocks, deleted file blocks and the unpartitioned spaces from the backup job.

Transmission Strategy

For XCP-ng, the backup data can be transferred through LAN or SAN (LAN-free) . For more information of the data transmission methods, please refer to Data Transmission.

If you choose to do the backups over LAN, the backup data will be transferred via the production network. But if you have a separated network for VM backup, please specify the network address in the Transmission Network in “network/prefix_length” format, e.g., 172.16.0.0/16. And you can choose to either encrypt the transmission or not by turning Encrypted Transfer option on or off.

SAN (LAN-free) can be used to transfer the backup data from the storage area network. LAN-Free path needs to be configured at first place, please refer to LAN-Free Path.

Advanced Strategy

The advanced strategy settings of Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer) are the incremental mode options.

For XCP-ng CBT is the recommended incremental mode. For more information of the incremental mode, please refer to Incremental Backup Methods.

Step 4. Review and Confirm Job Settings

After completing the above-mentioned settings, you can review and confirm the settings in one screen.

A job name can be specified for identification of the VM backup jobs, and by clicking on the Submit button to confirm the settings and create the backup job.

After creating a new backup job, you can find it on the Monitor Center > Jobs page, under the Current Job tab.