The HotAdd backup proxy must be a virtual machine. HotAdd involves attaching a virtual disk to the backup proxy, like attaching disk to a virtual machine. In typical implementations, a HotAdd proxy backs up either Windows or Linux virtual machines, but not both. For parallel backup, sites can deploy multiple proxies.

The HotAdd proxy must have access to the same datastore as the target virtual machine, and the VMFS version and data block sizes for the target VM must be the same as the datastore where the HotAdd proxy resides.

If the HotAdd proxy is a virtual machine that resides on a VMFS-3 volume, choose a volume with block size appropriate for the maximum virtual disk size of virtual machines that customers want to back up, as shown in VMFS-3 Block Size for HotAdd Backup Proxy. This caveat does not apply to VMFS-5 volumes, which always have 1MB file block size. As of vSphere 6.7, VMFS-3 is no longer supported.