Virtual Appliance Backups

[smokey71]

Hello,

Does anyone have experience with backing up virtual appliances? We have new Cisco Call Manager appliances that will be need to be backed up and I have zero experience with this. From my understanding, vDR does not work with the Cisco appliances and if that is the case, is there a product that does work? Does anyone do LUN based copies for backups? Any other methods that work well?

Thanks in advance for the help.

-Smokey

[ChrisDearden]

Why does VDR not work ?

I would assume with an appliance it would be easier to back up the configuration so that in the even tof failure you would redeploy the appliance then apply the saved config ?

[smokey71]

Cisco has a wiki that shows support for VMware features:

http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Unified_Communications_VMWare_Requirements#VMware_Data_Recovery

This is why I am perplexed on the backup methodology. It would seem like a waste to use to difference backup appliances but, that may have to happen.

Any ideas?

[DSTAVERT]

It looks like the only officially supported method is using VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB). There will need to be some change in this since VCB is close to End of Life.  VCB does have lots of commercial backup software support.

[AndreTheGiant]

Some VA do not have VMware Tools intalled and/or use a old version of virtual hardware.

Those may create some problem with new backup.

VCB could be a solution, but also a full backup without quescience (for backup software that have this option) must work.

Andre