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TAOH
Contributor
Contributor

VCB Logging and alerting

Hi

I have gotten VCB to succesfully backup my VM's as full VM images to a local hard drive over the ESX Console using the 'nbd' option which is great.

Apart from finding that it pretty much impossible to restore these VM's via VMWare Converter if they have been optimised (-M 1) I have been able to restore them using the vcbRestore command from the ESX host itself via either via a mount to the location of the VM images via SMB connection or if I copy these images to the VMFS partition first using Veeam and then restore locally. Either way works which is good.

My question though is logging and alerting of the VCB backup process. I would like to be able to check a log file after my backup script runs to check the backup was successful or even better to get an alert if there is any issue (or even if it was just successful). Am I asking too much of VCB??

I thought, even just saving the output of when the VCB script is run to a text file which can be checked after the backup would be better than nothing. If I could see all the information such as this below in a text file that would be good.

Converting "V:\VCB-Backup\BC-FS01\scsi0-0-0-BC-FS01.vmdk" (compact file):

0%=====================50%=====================100%

**********************************************************************************

Is there any best practice as to logging the results of VCB backups when done from the VCB Proxy?

Thanks

Simon

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dconvery
Champion
Champion

Simon -

If you add "-L 6" to the end of your vcbMounter line, it will produce verbose logs. The default is 3, which may be enough unless you are troubleshooting. The logs are located in %TEMP% by default, which is usually C:\windows\temp unless you changed the default. As for alerting, there is no native method of alerting, but you could probably produce a VI Toolkit / powershell script with logic to create and write to an event log based on return code of the vcbMounter process. Hope this helps.

Dave

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