Just to reiterate. It is *not* necessary to use VCB with all 3rd party backup products for VMWare. Veeam and vRanger both have the option to do network backups.
The benefit of VCB is that your proxy is hooked straight into the LUNs and there are almost no resources used on the ESX hosts. As others have mentioned, the problem comes in when backing up databases such as SQL and Exchange. You have to quiesce the OS and databases somehow or all you'll get are 'crash-consistent' backups that may or may not be useful. I'm using vRanger 3.X + VCB and freezing the databases with the VSS support builtin to the ESX 3.5 U4 VMWare tools. With vRanger you have to be very careful with how to set this up, and I received excellent guidance from their support team. So far I've restored a couple of VMs with SQL databases and everything's been fine. -----Original Message----- From: mse...@ont.com [mailto:mse...@ont.com] Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 1:12 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: VMWare tools Yes, all third party products use VCB, however, VCB by itself is a little more difficult to setup. The third party product eliminates having to do all of the custom scripting. Original Message: ----------------- From: Jonathan Link jonathan.l...@gmail.com Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:56:10 -0400 To: ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com Subject: Re: VMWare tools vRanger uses VCB. IIRC, all third party backup solutions for VM's require VCB. On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 12:51 PM, mse...@ont.com <mse...@ont.com> wrote: > You can use VCB or third party backup solution such as vRanger. The key is > what are your backup needs and budget. VCB works in conjuction with third > party products to do full VMDK and file level backups. The key is if you > need your VM nees quiesed before snapshot. I believe VCB alone may not do > this. Plus with VCB alone you will have to setup backup scripts manually. > The best solution if your budget allows is a third party solution installed > on a backup proxy. > > Mike > > Original Message: > ----------------- > From: Bill Songstad bsongs...@gmail.com > Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:01:27 -0700 > To: ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com > Subject: VMWare tools > > > I've been using ESXi 3.5 for about six months and I have run up on a need > that is not covered in the free hypervisor. So, as any industrious sole > might, I went to the VMware website to see what products might suit my > needs. And Viola! There I discovered that the marketing folks at VMware > are > sadists probably hired from the microsoft licensing team. > > So what I am polling about here is this: What are the essential tools for > managing VMware virtual servers? > > What I need is pretty simple. I just want to make backups of my servers > that I can restore to a different host without shutting them down or at the > very least by a script that I can run on Saturday nights. I don't > necessarily need to have vmotion especially since the products that include > it are more than my total server hardware budget. > > Are there less expensive tools from other publishers that I should check > out? The VMware stuff is a little outside my budget as far as I can divine > from their website. > > Any advice is appreciated, > > Bill > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ > ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > mail2web.com - Microsoft(r) Exchange solutions from a leading provider - > http://link.mail2web.com/Business/Exchange > > > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ > ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://link.mail2web.com/mail2web ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
