85 Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2011
15 Glossary
A
Agent (Acronis vmProtect Agent)
An application that performs backup and recovery of the virtual machines and enables other
management operations on the VMWare ESX/ESXi infrastructure such as task management and
operations with available backups, machines, etc.
Acronis vmProtect includes the Agent for backing up virtual machines residing on a VMWare
ESX/ESXi virtualization server which the Agent is connected to. There could be several ESX/ESXi hosts
or a vCenter managed by one Agent. The best practice is to register vCenter on the Agent instead of
specific ESX/ESXi hosts which are managed by this vCenter. Otherwise, vMotion (p. 95) will not be
supported.
The Agent component can be either Windows-based, i.e. installed on a Windows platform, or
Appliance-based, i.e. running on a special virtual machine on an ESX host.
Always Incremental archive
A new generation of the archive (p. 85) format which may contain several backups (p. 85) from
different virtual machines inside. All backups are saved to this archive in incremental mode (p. 92).
Physically all data is located inside one file as opposed to Legacy mode archive format where each
backup is stored in a separate TIB file. Here is the description of how the backups rotation is
performed inside the Always Incremental archive:
When one backup becomes expired according to the pre-defined retention rules (which say for
(they may be used in newer backups due to incremental backup technology) are not marked as
blocks and will increas
This approach allows us to keep the archive size as small as possible and prevents it from growing
indefinitely.
Archive
See Backup archive (p. 86).
