Need the best way to backup and restore a VM's data

[mooching]

I have a large file server VM that the file sharing drive is a dynamic disk.  Becuase of the dynamic disk I cannot backup the full VM and get incremental's using VCB.  Even upgrading to the new VADP will still have the same issue.  So we just got additional disk space for our SAN, a Clarieon CX3-40, and we are thinking about doing a backup and restore of the data on the shared volume so we can get rid of the dynamic disk.

Question, when you do a VCB snapshot backup of a system it grabs the VMDK's wether its *FULL*, ALLVMFS, or even d\, right?  If I do a restore of that info can I just restore the files or will it still see that backup as a drive and it would still be a dynamic disk, right?

Assuming the above is true, without installing a client on the server and doing a file level backup, which will take too much time, how else could we go about this?  I would like to accomplish this task in a timley fashon.  I have considered using a utility to convert the disk back to basic, but am concerned about data loss and how long it might take.  Client based backups of large, >1TB, can take over 48's I have found and we cant have the server down that long.  I was trying to see if there is another way using snapshots but nothing jumps out at me.

Thanks for any help that you may have.

By the  way we are using Networker 7.6.1 and vSphear 4.1.

[Ace007]

Hi

Regarding your question, its bit diffcult to give answer for me.

I suggust you to visit this links to get what you needed. Hope it will help you.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vcb_best_practices.pdf

[mooching]

Thanks for the response, I had not run accross that document yet and did provide some info but none that will help me much. 

After pondering this some more, I think what I need to do is a file level backup using the VCB and for the "save set" use "d\" instead of "allvmfs" or "full".  My hope is to be able to do a fast backup to the holding tank on the VCB proxy.  Go into the server and remove the file share volume that is Dynamic, add the new LUN and format it as the new shared volume as a basic disk.  Then do a file level restore to the new volume which should ve fairly quick. 

I guess my question is, if you backup using allvmfs or full, does it keep the volume information and it would be restored as a Dynamic disk unless you mount is else where and copy the files?  And to overcome that I should be able to use the d\ save set and restore directly to the new volume?

Hopefully this isnt too dumb of a question, I am just trying to understan the vmware backup better.

Thanks, John.

[Ace007]

Might be you dont know, that VCB is replaced by VDR (VMware data recovery) and vsphere 4.1 components onwards the support for VCB stopped.

If you want to know more about the backup procedure and to understand the vmware backup just read the below books.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35u2/vi3_35_25_u2_vm_backup.pdf

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vdr_12_admin.pdf

Hope this helps you.

[bulletprooffool]

If you have enough capacity available, why not create a new disk and run a copy using something like Robocopy (which can do incremental copies)

Once the initial copy has been run, you can scehdule a couple of hours downtime, to run an incremental copy and catch any changes, then migrate from the old disks to the new?