VMware Data Recovery vs VCB and vs Guest OS third party clients

[AdrianoOliveira]

I´m implementing VDR (VMware Data Recovery), and one big question is disturbing me, What´s the difference between VDR and VCB, if until now the best solution is image level backup with VCB or VDR (the new VMware recovery product) and for file level level backup the guest client.

[Rumple]

Those questions depend on your infrastructure and your retention and recovery policies.

VCB is used when you ahve an external system backing up your virtual machines

VDR can backup to a share without involving an external system (for example direct backup to a NAs)

Personally I would never implement VDR or VCB as the sole means of backups for an environment unless you can restore the entire server from backup without losing data (ie, webserver).

If you are running anything with a database, Active directory, or exchange you will most likely want either Operating level builtin backups happening or something with a backup Agent to do file and folder backups.

Remember that image levels do not truncate logs or take system states of active directory so you need something to do that for you.

VDR will allow you to recover individual files so if you run ntbackup (and not as easily, Windows Server Backup in Windows 2008) then you could just image your servers, keep as many copies as you need and if you needed to restore the system state for instance, you could just recover the system state file out of the particular image level backup.

[AndreTheGiant]

VDR:

• is a backup product

• require vSphere and a valid license for VDR

• works with a GUI (integrated in vCenter)

• works in a virtual appliance

• is only a B2D solution and cannot (in a simple way) be integrated in other program

• can save data to vmdk or NAS share (also CIFS share)

• backup are at image level (but restore can be at file level)

• first backup is full, the other are incremental

• it can do data deduplication

VCB:

• is a backup framework

• can work on vSphere but also on VI 3.x

• it (usual) require scripting and works in CLI

• it require a Windows Server that act as a "proxy"

• does not directly support B2T but can be integrated with other backup program

• for image level backup it require a stage area

• backup are at image level or file level (in this case only for Windows guest)

• image level backup are only full

• it cannot do data deduplication and compression, but can save the image in "compact mode"

Andre