So I finally have this prefected - I had to do a lot of CL Programming, and had to do a lot of tweaking to get this working. I will try and put everything in here that I went through to get it working. What I can do is post everything I have in place today. I hope you're a good CL programmer, or know one

First, make sure all the VM's have the VMware Tools with the "Volume Shadow Copy Services Support " selected. This doesn't get installed by default.

Second, on the Integrated Server that will be your VCB Proxy do the following.

• Install the VMware Consolidated Backup Framework
• Created a secondary drive (I call mine the V:\ drive) We'll talk about the size of this drive later - so read this whole thing before you do anything
• create a folder in the V:\ drive called mnt and share it
  • Make sure you have share name in your QUSRSYS/QAZLCSAVL file - see here http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/systems/scope/i5os/index.jsp?topic=/rzahq/rzahqflbackupsetup.htm for help
• Create a Batch program to do the mounting, and another to do the unmounting - this is for file level backups
• I put these in a directory called c:\vcb
  • mount.bat - your vCenter Server probably isn't called vcenter.acme.com and the uid and pwd probably need to be changed too
    • "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Consolidated Backup Framework\vcbmounter" -h vcenter.acme.com -u Adminaccount -p adminspassword -a name:%1 -r v:\mnt\%1 -t file -m nbd
  • unmount.bat - same rules apply here
    • "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Consolidated Backup Framework\vcbmounter" -h vcenter.acme.com -u Adminaccount -p adminspassword -U v:\mnt\%1
• I also created a bacth program to do image level backups - use the same unmount program
  • imount.bat
    • "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Consolidated Backup Framework\vcbmounter" -h vcenter.acme.com -u Adminaccount -p adminspassword -a name:%1 -r v:\mnt\%1 -t fullvm -m nbd
• now we're ready to go to the green screen

Create a CL on the green screen, if I've lost you already, please PM me and we can talk, or go to your application group.

I called mine vmbackup

The VMNAME is the name of the virtual machine on the esx host and it is case sensitive. The NWSD, is the name of the integrated server.

/**MOUNT VMNAME TO THE VCB PROXY SERVER*******************************/

SBMNWSCMD CMD('"C:\VCB\MOUNT VMNAME"') SERVER(NWSD)

on the vcb proxy server, go to v:\mnt and you will see a folder with the same name as your Virtual Machine. Open it, you will see the folder letters, keep going, and you see the drive letters. Now just figure out what you want to save, and put that into the path you see below.

/**SAVE THE FILES YOU WANT TO SAVE***********************************/
SAV DEV('/qsys.lib/TAP02.DEVD') +
OBJ(('/qntc/nlcvcb/mnt/VMNAME/letters/*path*')) ENDOPT(*LEAVE)

/**UNMOUNT VMNAME FROM THE PROXY SERVER*****************************/
SBMNWSCMD CMD('"C:\VCB\UNMOUNT VMNAME"') SERVER(NWSD)

Now just repeat for all the VM's you want to backup. I like to do an *UNLOAD on my last save, that way I know everything worked ok.

This is very basic code, you may want to put a lot more logic in your code. And please test this. I like tesing mine to a save file.

Now, if you want to do an image level backup of a VM, it's all the same, but you call the IMOUNT

And for sizing, let me first explain that doing a file level backup doesn't copy files over the vcb proxy. Doing an image backup does. The files do get compressed a little, but I always say this, you should make your v:\ drive as big as your largest VM that you are going to backup.

Please let me know if you have any questions.