Hi,
Does enabling CBT for all of the Virtual Machine that is managed by my Virtual Center is a good idea or not supposed to be due to the CBT overhead files ?
Do I need to reboot all of the Virtual Machine once I enable the CBT option manually one by one though the vSphere Console Edit Settings for each VM ?
Your assistance and help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Not sure about Avamar, but I'm pretty sure it provides an option to enable CBT. Networker provides a script to enable CBT. However, IIRC there's an issue with file-level restore when you use CBT with version 7.6!?
André
As known VMware acknowledges that CBT could lose track of incremental changes in the event of a power failure or hard shutdown. so its up to you and you dont need to reboot once you enable the CBT and apply it .
Hope that will help .
Yours,
Mar Vista
OK, so in this case is there any caveats that I need to consider when using this feature ?
My aim is to have a safe backup of all the production VM with smaller foot print and quicker backup window, I was thinking to enable it in all 450+ VM in my data center by using Powershell script.
Which backup application do you use? Most of them provide either built in options or scripts to enable CBT?
André
I'm using EMC Avamar 6.2 and Networker 7.6
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Disclaimer: This email was sent from my iPhone, apologize for any typographical error.
Not sure about Avamar, but I'm pretty sure it provides an option to enable CBT. Networker provides a script to enable CBT. However, IIRC there's an issue with file-level restore when you use CBT with version 7.6!?
André
Thanks Andre for the reply and clarification, but aside from the vendor bug / issue, there is no data store overhead or anything significant that I must be aware when implementing this feature in the large data center environment ?
CBT creates a fixed size ...-ctk.vmdk file (about 0.5MB per 10GB - see What is Changed Block Tracking in vSphere?) for each virtual disk (.vmdk) file to store the information about the changed blocks. I didn't do any performance tests, but since CBT is built into the VMkernel there's should not be a noticeable overhead for this.
André