VCB Commvault ( Simpana ) VM backups

[Bigaldover]

We are running ESX 3.5 Update 5 with Virtual Center 2.5 Update 6.

We have 12 ESX Hosts

6 DEV/QA ( Cluster )

6 Prod ( Cluster )

16 Dev SAN LUN Various Sizes 500G and 1 TB

9 Prod SAN LUN Various Sizes 500G and 1 TB

Totalling 21 TB of Storage although 10.3 used.

300 Virtual machines

We are looking at using VCB to have a DR copy of all our virtual machines.

I have borrowed a script from the net using a loop to get all powered on vm names from Virtual Center.

<<for /f “tokens=2 delims=:” %%i in (‘vcbvmname -h virtualcenter.domain -u vcbuser -p password -s Powerstate:on ^| find “name:”‘) do cscript pre-command.wsf “c:\program files\vmware\vmware consolidated backup framework\” %%i fullvm>>

This works when I specify a host or virtual center in the lab which only has 5 running vms.

What are people doing when they have more than 8-10 vms running ?

We do not want to create a backup job per vm in simpana.

Any suggestion comments are really appreciated.

If you need more information, please feel free to ask !

Thanks !

[DaveConverySHI]

Unless your backup software is "VCB aware," that is about the best method for backing up the VMs. You could also create a script that calls individual VMs or one that uses a txt file with a list of VMs.Please note that VCB will soon be deprecated with the next release of vSphere. Most backup software companies are working on or have just released versions that use the vStorage API, which is much better than VCB.

Here is a guide that I created for VCB a while back, but it may have some helpful tips for you -&gt;http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/2010/01/15/setting-up-vcb-for-any-backup-software-revisited/

Also, check out William Lam's GhettoVCBg2 -&gt; http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9843

Dave Convery, VCDX

VMware vExpert 2009

http://www.dailyhypervisor.com

Careful. We don't want to learn from this.

Bill Watterson, "Calvin and Hobbes"

[rhit73]

Hi,

which commvault version do you use? Simpana 8 supports the VSA (virtual server agent) for backing up VMWare.

Currently we use a separate subclient for every virtual machine we have (currently around 40)