Everything has been configured to allow the backup of the virtual machines in our cluster, we will now see how to protect the virtual machines using the backup policies that we have just created.

Manual protection

The most classic protection method is the manual protection of virtual machines from the HYCU interface.

To do this, connect to the management interface of your HYCU and go to “Virtual Machines”. You should have the list of all the virtual machines present on the Nutanix cluster that you previously added:

Select the virtual machine(s) to protect and click on “Set policy” at the top right:

Then select the backup policy you want to apply to your virtual machine and click “Assign”:

Your virtual machine is now protected, the first backup will take place during the backup time slot you previously defined. If you want to force the first backup, select the protected virtual machine and click “Backup” at the top right:

Then click on “Yes”:

If everything goes as expected, you will then have Compliance and Protection in a Green status:

Automated protection via categories under Nutanix

We have seen how to protect virtual machines manually from the Nutanix interface. But it is possible to do it directly from the Nutanix Prism Central interface.

To do this, it is important to set up the necessary prerequisites and the first is to create categories to which the virtual machines will be assigned. Connect to Prism Central, go to “Administration > Categories”:

Then click on “New Category”:

Name your category, give it a value and click “Save”. For simplicity, I put the same value:

Then log in to HYCU and edit the previously created backup policy and check “Auto-assignment”:

Below, new fields are now accessible. Fill in the values ​​of the category you created previously and click on “Add”:

Back on Prism Central, on the list of my virtual machines, we can see that no virtual machine belongs to a category:

The only virtual machine protected at the moment is the VM-DEMO-HYCU that I protected manually in the first part of this article. So I will now select the VM-DEMO-LAB virtual machine, click on the menu “Action > Other Actions > Manage categories”:

I select the category to assign to my virtual machine and I validate:

Back on my HYCU interface, I can see that my virtual machine is now part of the BACKUP policy. It was automatically assigned to this backup policy when I assigned it the corresponding category, an operation confirmed by the Events in HYCU: