Media Agent VSA Install

Hello Ravi,

you wanted to provide backup using Azure MediaAgent for on-prem vCenter? 

Hi Luke,

That’s right - used to backup on prem Vcenter. We currently use a Media Agent hosted on VMware which works fine. But need to have that hosted in Azure going forward.

Thanks

You may encounter performance and stability issues with that configuration. Specifically, the VSA/MA must be able to mount the VM disks directly to its own OS via HotAdd (or ideally, SAN). If it cannot, the system will fall back to NBD (Network Block Device) transport mode, which will significantly extend your backup windows.

Alternatively, you could consider deploying smaller, local VSA proxies on-premises while keeping the MediaAgent in the cloud to handle the DDB and storage. However, separating them this way introduces latency between the local proxies and the cloud-hosted storage, which can still cause performance degradation.

Ultimately, due to the inherent network latency between your on-premises infrastructure and the cloud, running this specific configuration puts you at a high risk for backup timeouts.

Thanks for your detailed reply.

Is there a way we can avoid the performance and stability issues at all? Can I set up HotAdd on the new media agent?

We are slowly moving VMs away from VMware, as part of the process we need to migrate Commvault to Azure. 

Thanks

The easiest way would be to simply keep local VSA/MA on-prem until the migration is completed, alternatively you may go with on-prem VSA and cloud MA, but there mentioned delays/timeouts may occur. It hard to provide adequate answer without knowing the project. 

Hot-add won’t work remotely, local proxy would be required - HotAdd Transport for VMware