VCB important questions

[taou]

hello everybody,

i need your help please.

i have to configure a proxy backup server (VCB) and i hope to help me.

overview:

- I have 3 VMs stored on a SAN storage (EVA) with windows server.

- I have an ESX server and another physical server with windows 2003 server as a proxy server (VCB)

- A software for backup (data protector)

steps that i do:

on proxy server

- i disconnect the fibre channel and i do the following like the example of vmware document:

1 Shut down the Windows proxy.

2 Disconnect the Windows proxy from the SAN or mask all the LUNs containing VMFS volumes or RDM for virtual machines.

3 Boot the proxy and log into an account with administrator privileges.

4 Open a command‐line interface.

5 Run the diskpart utility by typing: diskpart

6automount disable

7 automount scrub

8 Exit

9 Shut down Windows.

10 Reconnect the Windows proxy to the SAN, or unmask all previously masked

LUNs containing

after that

1 Log into the VCB proxy using an account with administrator privileges.

2 Install the Consolidated Backup package by running setup.exe

3 During the installation, choose an installation directory for Consolidated Backup or accept the default one.

my question:

-During the installation i didn't receive any message to indicate the default directory (c:\mnt) but i have change the config.js file to the correct value including the default directory.

-on C directory i don't have a c:\mnt directory. what is the problem???? why this directory isn't visible and found.

-how can i check if the virtual machine is mounted on c:/mnt directory and is there any script to write to mount the VM or it is the role of VCB product??

-The LUN that contains the VM is not presented to the Proxy server, i hope to know if it is important to present this LUN or Vdisk to the VCB server???

thanks for yr help

hicho

[AntonVZhbankov]

VCB is officially declared dead, so I'd suggest to take a look at 3rd party backup solutions able to work via vStorage API like Veeam Backup (my personal choice), esXpress or vRanger.

---

MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[RobertPRAG]

I'm using VCB with vSphere v4 Update 1 absolutely fine. If it has been declared 'dead' this is a shame as it works perfectly for doing backups without the cost of buying additional tools to do something that already worked fine. I guess it depends on how you are using VCB.

I'm hoping this will help the original poster slightly (I don't have a SAN so it may be slightly different depending on what you are trying to achieve). If you have configured the values within the config.js that is fine (the command line below actually overrides most of these values anyway).

"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Consolidated Backup Framework\vcbMounter.exe" -h hostname -u BackupUsername -p password -a name:VMSession -r D:\Backup\VMSession -t fullvm -m nbd -M 1

This command, snapshots the virtual machine, and then takes a full VM backup while transfering it to the D drive using the network (NBD) in the directory structure specified. You should also be aware that if the directory you specify for the VM backup already contains a VM backup, the backup will not work. If you have vCenter you can specify the vCenter server instead of the specific ESX host.

My VCB proxy is a Windows Server 2008R2 box with a lot of storage on the D drive (its also the vCenter server). If I ever need to use one of these backups I use VMware Enterprise Converter within vCenter and import the backup straight back to the host - this works flawlessly for me.

Hope that helps with what you are trying to achieve.

Thanks

Rob

[bitbucket]

As Robert PRAG already posted you can test by the command shell if vm's are mounted correctly. I modified the command he posted to fit to a SAN environment as I guess you want to use the SAN mode for VCB.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Consolidated Backup Framework\vcbMounter.exe" -h hostname -u BackupUsername -p password -a name:VMSession -r D:\Backup\VMSession -t fullvm -m san -M 1

But there are some preconditions that have to be given.

1. You have to create the mount directory manually and it has to be placed on a drive with enough capacity to hold the biggest of your vm's, even if you want to do just a file level backup of the mounted vm.

2. You have to present all LUNs that are holding vm's you want to backup to your VCB proxy. Note that this has to be the same type as for the ESX hosts (I don't know how this is called on an EVA, on my Datacore I have to select 'VMware ESX' and on my old HP MSA-1000 it was 'LINUX').

3. This is why you have to keep the VCB proxy from trying to mount all volumes he sees. If you do not disable the automount you are just a mouse click away from a disaster!

The command shown above will mount a vm and does a fullvm backup. You can use this command just to test if all vm's are mounted correctly. Just stop the backup process by pressing CTRL-C, all snapsshots and the directory on the VCB proxy should be removed automatically.

You might want to make sure that using VCB does not leave any orphaned snapshots that are not listed in the vCenter. I used these commands on a ESX host to identify orphaned snapshots: 'cd /vmfs/volumes' and 'find ./ -name *.vmsn -print'

Hope this helps a little bit.

[taou]

hello guys,

thank y very much for yr help and support but i take into consideration yr information:

i have presented the LUN to VCB server and install VCB software...

but when i execute this commands:

vcbMount -h esxname -u esxusername-p esxpassword -a name:VMSession -r c:\mnt -t fullvm -m san -M 1

i have receive only 1 file in the directory \mnt including windows files and not the vmware files .vmx, .log....

i don't receive inforation when i execute this command (vcbmount) like this:

Copying "[system-raid1] vcb-backup/vcb-backup.vmx":0%=====================50%=====================100%

**************************************************

Copying "[system-raid1] vcb-backup/vcb-backup.nvram":

0%=====================50%=====================100%

**************************************************

Copying "[system-raid1] vcb-backup//vmware.log":

0%=====================50%=====================100%

**************************************************

what is the problem?? any help!!!!

[monderick]

add -L 6 > x.log to the end of that command, should provide some idea on what the problem is.

[taou]

the problem is solved by restarting the VCB proxy.

but any idea how to mount more than one VMs with the command vcbmounter....

[bitbucket]

No idea how to do it with the vcbmounter command. But when I used VCB as primary backup solution I used a scheduler with a script to achieve that. I noticed that depending on the net size and the underlying LUN of the vm, I got a better overall throughput when I mounted up to 4 vm's parallel. So I scheduled several 'blocks' to be backed up sequentially while each block contained vm's that were backed up parallel.

I used the tool 'oddjob' for doing this. Sure, there are much better tools for doing the same while having more capabilties of exeption handling and logging. But oddjob is for free and helped me to get quick results.

[taou]

sorry vcbmounter command

[bitbucket]

What messages are shown when you keep the command shell open where you started the vcbmounter? Additional messages are generated when the process is aborted or completed.