Using VMWare Data Recovery plus a guest installed backup

[vwemil]

Hi Everyone. We were using VMWare Data Recovery and it worked well. (We are on ESXi 4.0 with the latest VMDR Appliance 1.2 something)

We are backing up about 30 machines give or take to a NAS. One thing I noted is that ten machine tasks running at once is too much load for the NAS in our envirement. What we saw start happening was machines getting frozen for 20-30 minutes while the snapshots were removed.

Then we found some machines with deep snapshot (4-5-6-7 deep) that were never removed and thus built upon one another.

So we disabled the VMDR appliance to troubleshoot.

Here are my questions:

1. Does it matter if we also have a backup utility on some clients that backs up essential data, but not the enitre machine? The software does call to the Microsoft VSS in the guest. This is related to SQL or Exchange and regualr file backups of critical data.

2. Why does VMDR sometimes not remove the snapshots? And then the job fails altogether for that machine?

Thanks for yor input!!!

Steve

[AntonVZhbankov]

1. Does it matter if we also have a backup utility on some clients that backs up essential data, but not the enitre machine? The software does call to the Microsoft VSS in the guest. This is related to SQL or Exchange and regualr file backups of critical data.

Not really I believe. Just try to schedule VMware image backup and guest OS level backup to run at different times.

2. Why does VMDR sometimes not remove the snapshots? And then the job fails altogether for that machine?

Sometimes it happen that snapshot is failed to commit and remains in place. Next backup = next snapshot.

Just write a small script to check if there any snapshots left to run every day in the morning.