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Justin_King
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

fullvm VCB backup occupies the local drive space?

Title pretty much says it all, but I wanted to confirm.

I traditionally have done file level VCB backups in which the LUN gets mounted under the mnt folder and I can then do a classic filescan backup. The main advantage here is that because I'm dealing with a mount point I ca nsafely mount all my VMs at once, run the backup, then unmount them at once.

After some thought I figured I'd get better performance backing up the disk files and not individual files (much easier to backup one 8b file than 8g worth of 512k files). But using the Full VM process seems to copy the resulting snap to the local disk for backup?

If this is true there's no way I have the room on my proxy to backup all 40+ Virtual servers.

Is there another bakcup mode seperate from "file" or "fullvm" that will let me simply browse the shared LUN and copy out disk files? Or are these really the only two options?

(I'm opento any clever ideas as well, but this is my general question).

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Byron_Zhao
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

It will use the local storage, but VCB is doing one VM at a time, and it will delete the VM image files after it backs it up to tape.

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kix1979
Immortal
Immortal

As Byron said, you can have it clean them up after it dumps to tape. However, you will need local disk space up to the largest size VM or number of VMs you plan on concurrently wish to export. I would plan for the largest VM you have, multiply by 2 - 4 and use that size. Also you can export the VMs sparse, so it removes the whitespace, which will help with size.

Thomas H. Bryant III
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jjamieson
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

How do you specify sparse for VCB? Can't find any options for it.

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kix1979
Immortal
Immortal

You can use the option -F 1

Thomas H. Bryant III
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jjamieson
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Okay so that's on... what now? Say I'm using the Backup Exec module, do I specify it there against the pre-backup.bat script? Do I add it to the command.wsf command string in that file?

Anything? There's like 6 places I could see putting that.

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kix1979
Immortal
Immortal

Um... not sure you can use that option with Backup Exec. I've heard some people say that you have to export the full with BE and some of the other backup tools. I'm not 100%, so maybe someone with BE experience can chime in if you can use the -F option?

Thomas H. Bryant III
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jjamieson
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I edited the \generic\glue.js file and added a line to add "-F 1" to the vcbMounter command. It seems to be working, we'll see if I can restore it okay.

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zemotard
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Do you think VBC will be able to backup vmdk without to copy them in proxy server in futur version ?

Does exist a gui with VCB to generate command line ?

Regards

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sacker
Contributor
Contributor

hy !

Did you manage the restore ? And if you did : How ?

Thank you

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