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Chapter 2
Before You Install
In order to perform LAN Free backups, vRanger must be installed on a physical system attached to
your SAN environment. This is a high performance configuration that requires vRanger to be
connected to your fibre or iSCSI network. In addition, the VMFS volumes containing the VMs to be
protected must also be properly zoned/mapped to the vRanger server.
Configuring vRanger for LAN-Free
With vRanger will be installed on a physical server, the following configurations must be made:
Disable automount on the vRanger machine:
From the start menu, select “Run” and enter diskpart.
Run the automount disable command to disable automatic drive letter assignment.
On your storage device, zone your LUNs so that the vRanger HBA (or iSCSI initiator) can see
and read them.
2.3.2.b
Run the automount scrub command to clean any registry entries pertaining to previously
mounted volumes.
Only one vRanger server should see a set of VMFS LUNs at one time. For backups only, The
vRanger server should have only read-only access to the LUNs. In order to perform LAN-Free
restores, please ensure that the vRanger server has Read + Write access to any zoned VMFS
LUNs to which you wish to restore.
Network Backups
Network Mode within vRanger can be configured one of two ways, depending on your source server
configuration. For network-based backups when using ESX, or for physical server backups, the
backup data flows “direct to target” from the source server to the target repository. This means that
the vRanger server does not process any of the backup traffic.
When the source VM is on an ESXi host, there is no service console to process the backup activity.
In this configuration the data is transferred from the VM to the vRanger server using VMware’s VDDK
transport. The data is then sent to the repository over the network.
Note: Generally, this configuration will yield the slowest performance, and should be avoided if
possible. A better option would be to deploy a virtual appliance to any ESXi servers, and use that
virtual appliance for backup and restore tasks.