Using VCB to backup to local disk.

[Matthew_Conexio]

I am currently testing our pre-production VI3 infrastructure. I have the latest builds of ESX, Virtual Center and VCB.

My goal is to be able to make image backups of VMs, for disaster recovery purposes. File level backups I take care of within the VMs. I've been reading through the forums and all the VCB documentation, but all isn't clear. The documentation specifies to use the 3rd party backup software to run the pre and post scripts, but I don't have that kind of time to run backups at night, there isn't enough time in the night. My work around was to schedule scripts on the VCB proxy to dump the VM backups to a big, local hard drive attached to the VCB proxy and then it would be possible to then back that up to tape during the day, when the drive is free. So then I come to the scripts. Now I'm partly lost, because I'm not sure what the vcbmounter command on the VCB proxy does. I'm testing the following command:

vcbmounter.exe -h our_server_name -u username -p password -a ipaddr:192.168.1.1 -r d:\VMbackup\Citrix -t fullvm -m san

Ok. this command dumps to the Drive like I want. But then there is the umount command which I read that must be run, but it deletes my files:

vcbmounter.exe -h our_server_name -u username -p password -U d:\VMbackup\Citrix

Does anyone know exactly what the vcbmounter does in terms of the snapshot functionality. I mean, is it making a snapshot and then if I don't run the umount command, the snapshot is left? Or is this command not making snapshots at all and when I try to restore my backed up VM files, they will be corrupt? Or will it leave unneeded files on the SAN, left over snapshots?

Any help will be appreciated,

Thanks

[bister]

VCB creates a snapshot and copies that to the local disk of your VCB-proxy after the pre-script (mount) is run. The the VMDK needs to be backed up by the 3rd party backup software or manually copied to another location. After that the post-script (unmound) is run which commits the snapshot and deletes the first copy made on the VCB-proxy disk.

Hope this makes it clear.

[kix1979]

VCB only works with SAN storage. There is no way to use a VCB proxy host to backup your local storage on ESX.

[Matthew_Conexio]

I know that VCB works with SAN storage, that is one of the reasons that I wanted to use it. It is a faster backup.

I have been working with it more and when the VCB script runs, it does put the files on a physical disk, visible to Windows. I do not use backup software, but I can assume that then the "tape backup system" would run and backup the files and then run the post script, which deletes the files and then removes the snapshot. I have done a twist and after the pre script runs, files are in a temporary spot, I run a copy, to another drive mounted in Windows, D:. All the files are copied there and then the post script runs and deletes the temp files and I still have the files on another drive. Then at a later time, I can backup the files to tape if i want, without anything to do with ESX at that point, only the Windows system is being used.

My main concern was if the VCB vcbmount command was doing a snapshot. I have found that it is true. I have done a backup using VCB and deleted the test VM and all associated files and did a restore using VMware Converter and had no problems.

Hope this helps anyone else wondering about VCB.