VCB over IP - Stress on ESX host?

[woco_mike]

Hi All,

I have a situation where we have a high speed connection back to our DR site, and would like to sweep off VM's to our SAN there. If I use vcbmounter with the -nbd option (backing up VMDK over IP), will that cause stress on the ESX host that's running the VM? Or is the stress put on the VirtualCenter Server???

Thanks in advance!

-Mike

[Hairyman]

Mike,

Why not instead use SAN replication?

Cheers

Aaron

[woco_mike]

Aaron,

We're going from an HP SAN to an EMC SAN... Not sure if that matters or not. Also, we're on a really limited budget. Is there any free SAN replication software out there?

Thanks,

-Mike

[Texiwill]

Hello,

One way to do this is at the same time you do your backups. Backup the full VMDK then restore the VMDK to the hot site all will support this.

Veeam Backup has replication built in, Vizioncore sells vReplicator. Or you can use things like VISBU to script the first approach.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[woco_mike]

Ok, so here is another view/idea regarding my situation.

Our backup SAN has 2 LUNs. One LUN is used by our member districts to backup their data to... The other LUN is reserved for VMDK's.

Is there a way I can format this 2nd LUN to VMFS and sweep my VMDK's off to it weekly via my VCB Proxy (Over IP). Then when we fire up our DR hosts, they'll see the VMFS partition and all of the VMDK's?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Yes that is possible as well, the VCB proxy server must see both VMFS file systems to make this happen. Or you could setup one ESX server to do the sweep for you within the server and never use VCB. Check out http://vmprofessional.com/index.php?content=esx3backups for a comparison of tools. You can run VCB from the CLI as well on ESX (VISBU, esXpress, vmbk.pl do this) or you can use VCB as well.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[kjb007]

Yes, it will stress your esx host. When you run vcb in nbd mode, the esx host service console is what is being used to backup.

-KjB

[depping]

It will stress the console for sure. the SC is being used for all the trafic and with Full Image dumps this can be a lot. Might be worth checking out products that can do incremental! that will save you time!

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

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