Best Practice: Independent Disks, VCB & Windows 2003 File Shares?

[mobcdi]

I'm looking for the communities advice about independent disks, VCB and file shares. At the moment I haven't converted my vmdk file that holds my file share data to independent but am considering it because of the storage needs when I take a snapshot plus the problem of restoring back to a snapshot causing all changes to the file store to be lost.

I'm using VirtualCenter 2.5.0 Build 119801

I am planning to implement VCB soon and want to make sure any changes to my vmware disk type won't stop me making the most of VCB later.

Am i right in thinking that setting a vmdk to "independent" means it won't be saved in a snapshot or in a VCB backup?

Possible solution

• Enable volumn shadow copy on the windows guest vm file share to allow users recover accidental changes to files

• Change that share's vmdk to be independent so its not captured in snapshots or vcb

• Add a new vmdk file so the guest vm can run a scheduled point in time daily file backup and save the backup there which will get saved in snapshots and VCB

Am I missing something or does the above solution fall down somewhere?

[kjb007]

Snapshots will ignore vmdk's that are marked independent.

-KjB

[RParker]

In addition to what kjb said, why not use shadow copies, if it's a file server VM, you can retain copies of files between backups. But the purpose of VCB is to do backup's anyway, so why complicate it by trying to make the disk independent and at the same time making snapshot backups (but that won't work anyway).

[mobcdi]

Am i right in thinking that its possible for VCB to backup a vm with some independent disks as long as you don't choose to include the vm's memory in the snapshot?

My solution outlined above was to use shadow copies to cover for minor errors like accidental changes and to create a backup job on the vm that would save the file share to a 2nd vmdk (backup) in a compressed format which isn't set to be independent to create point in time backups of the file share.

The hope would be then to use VCB to backup the OS vmdk and backup vmdk so if the vm fails I can revert to it from VCB

[kjb007]

Yes, as long as your intent is not to backup the independent disk, you should be fine with backing up the regular disks with vcb. As far as I know, you can't change the snapshot method when using VCB to exclude memory, as that's not really required. This typically does not make much of a diference on a file server, but affects database servers differently, as a snapshot could cause problems with stability in some cases there with the snapshot's filesystem quiesce process. The VSS based snapshots help alleviate that issue.

-KjB