VCB Multiple VM backup - "Grouping"

[jjamieson]

Okay I've wasted enough time trying to decipher the VCB documentation section on grouping virtual machines and searching Google, Yahoo, Usenet, vmtn..

I figure I'll call as soon as I get the chance, because there's just no help on this issue, and I'm very surprised. BUT, maybe someone can help me here before it comes to that.

In the VCB document:

"If you have multiple virtual machines to back up, group these virtual machines and set up different aliases for these groups, all pointing to the same IP address of the VCB proxy."

Holy mother of... Where do I start?

"If you have multiple virtual machines to back up.."

Of course I do, it's VMware, that's the point!

"..group these virtual machines.."

As in..? What? A resource group? A cluster group? An AD group?

"..set up different aliases for these groups.."

Could you be any less specific?

"..all pointing to the same IP address of the VCB proxy."

What would that get me? If I create an A record called "VMBK111.domain.com" and give it the IP address of the VCB proxy, how does the VCB Proxy know what VM's to back up? As far as I can tell, you USE DNS NAMES to tell it what to back up, so by not using any..?

This must work, if it's in the documentation. But come on, throw us a bone here!

[dinny]

Hi again,

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=70283&start=10&tstart=0

Must be worth some points

I don't think I'm going to get any for the thread we initially discussed it on

Dinny

[jjamieson]

Indeed, you were helpful - and would have been correct if I were using NetBackup - then again, I might not have been so boggled if I did since it makes sense if you aren't using BackupExec.

I'll be calling support tomorrow morning to get the scoop directly from the source.

[dinny]

Thanks

I look forward to hearing their reply...

Dinny

[dinny]

Hiya,

Was just tidying my desk and found some bumpf on Backup Exec that I printed off weeks ago when I was first looking at VCB - it might be useful for you?

Sounds like someone else wasn't impressed with the level of integration for BackupExec and decided to improve it?

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid94_gci1233940,00.html

Dinny

[jjamieson]

Indeed, I've read that. It looks like it would be useful in special circumstances - if your VM's are named similarly (Like VM01, VM02, VM03, etc.)

I have a ticket in with Support about this, but unfortunately since we buy our licenses via Dell (which I wish we didn't have to do, but being a Government institution it's either go with an approved vendor or go out to bid...) I have to go through them. Dell has their own VMware team, and can escalate to VMware if they can't figure it out.

I'm going to post here once I get more feedback from them. In the meantime, I've taken another approach and I have ditched the packaged VCB scripts entirely for my own, which run vcbmounter.exe directly. It's much nicer 😃 I used WinBatch because I'm not very good with Javascript or perl or anything like that. But WinBatch is actually pretty powerful, and I have it logging to the event log, a file log, and the script is all configurable via an easy to read .ini file.

Because Winbatch is easy, I'm also going to use it to do a simple GUI that will list available VM's in a file folder, and present them in a "click to restore this VM" type list. This works for me because every Friday I export all 120 or so VM's to the VCB proxy (it's got about 1.5TB of storage, and I use windows file compression for the backup folders) and then back that up over the weekend - starting around Saturday night depending on when one of the tape drives becomes available in the library. It will also make it easier for someone besides me to restore a VM, which is always good 😃

Once I'm done with it I'll post it for anyone that's interested.

Ultimately I'd like to see the vcb stuff get more mature and offer better tools to do this stuff. There's plug-ins for Backup Exec to back up all sorts of things, and what I'd like to see is that level of integration in Backup Exec. Being able to use the Backup Exec administrator to select virtual machines to back up similar to selecting SQL or Exchange Databases would be the ultimate.

[JasonF88]

Does anyone have a full working version of Andrew Kutz's scripts. I've tried editing according to his instructions without success. I've fairly clueless with JavaScript so I'm unsure if I've edited correctly.

I'm try to use the *-FullVM option but the logs are showing "unable to resolve *-FullVM" so I guess something is wrong in the function that changes this wild card into a list of VM's

I'm using VC 2.0.2 Update 1 and VCB Build 51389.

Thanks