Wow...Data Recovery

[MattG]

So I just wathced the Data Recovery demo video:

http://download3.vmware.com/demos/data-recovery/39582_DataRecoveryDemo_R2.html

So here it what I get from this video:

• VCB is now Data Recovery

• No more separate VCB server (correct me if am wrong)

• DR is a virtual appliance just plug it in, turn it on and associate a VC to it and it is now up and running and ready to do backups of your infrastructure via the GUI.

• Since DR is an appliance no reliance on separate physical box and associated FC cards.

• Destination of backups can be any file share location including VMs. This is cool in that it will allow me to leverage the 800GB of unused ESX Local Disk space that I no longer use because of migration SAN. I don't care if I have to park the VM because it's on local disk.

• It automatically dedupes and compresses. Dedupe is really interesting. Would like to see how this affect BUP sizes?

• Includes expiration of old BUPs. Which is important for space.

I would imagine the 3rd party image based BUP vendors are going to release versions of their software that enahnce these features? Unless I am missing something this product will eliminate the need for us to use vRanger.

-MattG

[MattG]

Just read that VMware considers DR appropriate for small offices of less than 100 VMs? Why?

I am assuming that for larger environments it would be recommended to have a dedicated VCB type physical box?

-MattG

[depping]

Larger companies typically will use a third party backup tool, which will also be able to hook in to the vStorage API.

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator

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[admin]

Currently it is recommended you only have one VDR appliance per VC server, you can have more but there is no communication between them so they can clash and over-lap backups and they don't share a de-dupe datastore. If you only have one VDR appliance you can do a maximum of 8 concurrent VMDK backups across the farm. Also there is currently limit of 500GB on the de-dupe datastore. I believe they took all this into account when coming up with the figure of "100VMs or less".

Alex

www.phdvirtual.com

[MattG]

What do you mean by 500GB on de-dupe datastore? Does that mean I couldn't use this (if I was adventerous) on a 1TB Windows file share VM?

-MattG

[admin]

I mean that the datastore it uses to store the actual backup data is limited to 500GB currently, but remember that it is deduplicated so you will be able to store backups for more than 500GB of VMs (in most cases). I believe it currenty uses a VMDK for this. So, it doesn't necessarily mean you could not backup your 1Tb Windows VM, it would mean that you could only back it up if it contained less than 500GB of unique data-blocks. Unfortunately it's very hard until you actually start doing backups to work out how well your data will deduplicate, so you can't really say "you will fit X GB of backup data in 500GB of storage" because you don't know how much duplication of data there is in you environent. One thing you can take for granted pretty much is that empty space inside VMs will use next to nothing in the backup store.

Alex

www.phdvirtual.com

[vhii81]

SO whats the difference between VCB and this?

as i know, VCB still works with vsphere? http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/cb_features.html