Best Practices for VCB

[jredwine2857]

Does anyone have any good best practices including 3rd party solutions that make the whole VCB backup process much more bulletproof?

I have another question out there similar to this, but I am looking more for people using a 3rd party solution such as Veeam or vRanger solution, or even a hardware solution.

We have a SAN and 2 ESX hosts, 1 VC server, and a VCB proxy server running Backup Exec 11d.

It just seems to clunky and bulky just using VCB out of the box. I know there are a ton of products out there. Anyone using any particular solution that seems to really cover all of the quirks of vcb?

Here are my issues with VCB:

1. Snapshots fail fairly often. (And no notification is always given that this has occured. Seems like they would build something in to resolve this. I have seen the scripts that do this, but jeez what a hodge podge solution. We paid good money for VCB and VMWare. We shouldnt have to run home grown scripts to do this.)

2. Data is not compressed when snapshots are created in the staging area. (I understand vRanger does compress at the staging volume)

3. Many separate jobs have to be created to get all of the different types of backups you need. (i.e. fullvm vs file level)

I am just waiting for someone to tell me "Man you need to be using <insert name of product here>. This is what everyone is using. No one uses VCB on it's own like that."

I just feel like I must be missing something, because I can't believe that most people are satisfied with the way it works on its own. (And I have also seen the breadth of products out there that have been developed to assist VCB, so others must have felt the same.)

Anyone have a solution they are using in conjunction with VCB that they simply love?

[mlubinski]

Hi,

Well I was before working for a company, that also had 2xESXVCVCBproxy (CA Brighstor) installed. we were running about 40 production VMs. We used VCB to back them up (fullvm). File-level backup is stupid, as there can be no differential/incremential backup, as all mounted files are "new" every time snapshot taken

We started to create vcb backups using integration modules for CA, but this was f*cked up, CA didn't know how to set -M 1 option to make 1vmdk for each disk, VMware said - ask CA, as this is their product.

Finally I made such solution:

On our backup server, I setup 500GB volume (internal disks), and prepared bat file that did command vcbmounter.exe for every VM needed to backup (I needed to backup only 20VMs). Every VM was backed up with fullvm type and -M 1 mode (1vmdk/disk) and -L 6 (biggest logging).

It run every niight, starting at 11PM, and finishing about 4-5AM.

at the end of this script I put script that sent email about which folders were backed up (vbs that compared folder names created on backup server with VM names that should be backed up). and It also sent logfile created.

So every morning when I came to work, I checked my email, saw that for example VM1, VM5 and VM7 were missing on VCBproxy volume, so this mean that they need to be "checked" why. Then I took a look at log and saw frequent entries about SCSI reservations. So I needed to fix this issue. Then fixed these VMs(often hung snapshot) and repeat this script manually.

I know in big environments it is not an option (too much manual work), but if you have storage like EMC, Netapp or other big solutions, then their SNAPSHOTS are enough to backup this data instead of using VCB

[LarsLiljeroth]

Hi

In my oppinion VCB is useless unless you have a good backup product on top. We use vRanger witch is quite ok. But not the best. Hopefully the new version is

putting it up a big level.

I have seen a demo of CommVault and i think this is really a super cool product. So i would reccomend you to evaluate that.

// Lars Liljeroth

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[dconvery]

You can check out my VCB "Proven Practice" Guide on VI:OPS -> http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1392

While you are on the site, click on the "Availability" button and browse some of the VCB solutions for integrsting with specific backup software. I also wrote one for VCB with NetBackup an vRangerPro and presented it at VMworld 2008. -> http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1133

Dave Convery

VMware vExpert 2009

http://www.dailyhypervisor.com

Careful. We don't want to learn from this.

Bill Watterson, "Calvin and Hobbes"

[athlon_crazy]

Does anyone have any good best practices including 3rd party solutions that make the whole VCB backup process much more bulletproof?

I have another question out there similar to this, but I am looking more for people using a 3rd party solution such as Veeam or vRanger solution, or even a hardware solution.

We have a SAN and 2 ESX hosts, 1 VC server, and a VCB proxy server running Backup Exec 11d.

It just seems to clunky and bulky just using VCB out of the box. I know there are a ton of products out there. Anyone using any particular solution that seems to really cover all of the quirks of vcb?

Here are my issues with VCB:

1. Snapshots fail fairly often. (And no notification is always given that this has occured. Seems like they would build something in to resolve this. I have seen the scripts that do this, but jeez what a hodge podge solution. We paid good money for VCB and VMWare. We shouldnt have to run home grown scripts to do this.)

1. Mostly this happened due to wrong backup policies when you configured vcb using "san" mode. On vcb best practice doc, when using "san" method you need to consider few thing such :

1. Too many concurrent backup / snapshot creation on single VMFS volume may caused your snapshot performance drop or backup job failed.

2. via "san" mode, vcb may hit your maximum I/O capacity if you don't limit it. This make sense since VCB dont know how to control it.

2. Data is not compressed when snapshots are created in the staging area. (I understand vRanger does compress at the staging volume)

Default "-F 0" vcb should compress your image unless you choose "-F 1"

3. Many separate jobs have to be created to get all of the different types of backups you need. (i.e. fullvm vs file level)

That's happening when too much expectation on VCB even though VCB actually is just a tool for Windows to recognize VMFS volume.

vcbMC-1.0.6 Beta

vcbMC-1.0.7 Lite

[okeedokee]

Man you need to be using esXpress. This is what we're using and with great results. We don't use VCB on it's own like that.

Regards