VMware Data Recovery and backup of RDM disks

[pinkerton]

Hi,

we're currently in the process of planning a small infrastructure using vSphere 4 (currently planned two hosts with about 25-50 virtualized servers) and want to

make use of Data Recovery to backup the virtual machines.

The Administrator's Guide states that if a virtual machine is selected, any disk added to the virtual machine is included to the backup.

What does this mean for virtual machines using disks mapped via Raw Device Mapping? Will the full content of those disks be part of the backup or will it

only be only the small mapping file that points the virtual machine to the actual raw disk?

I'm asking because we are planning to use RDM for adding data partitions to the virtual machines so we can keep the actual virtual machine disks small for

backing them up and restoring them easily, rather than keeping everything in one or several large VMDK files. Hence, we want to use Data Recovery for

backing up the virtual machine disk files only and don't want it to back up the data partitions as well (since this data is being backed up by our current backup

solution).

Thanks

Michael

[admin]

Michael,

1) You can unselect/select individual disks to be protected by Data Recovery - when creating the backup job, you can drill down and select/unselect disk/VMs. By default, all the virtual disks on the protected VM will be backed up when a VM is selected to be protected.

2) There are two types of RDMs - physical and virtual compatibility mode. The former cannot be snapshotted - and thus CANNOT be protected using VMware Data Recovery (or any backup/recovery product built on top of VCB/vStoreage API for Data Protection). No issue protected RDMs in virtual compatibility mode.

3) Data Recovery backs up the entire content of the disk. Note that the first backup will transfer all blocks of data. However, for the second and subsequent backups, Data Recovery will only transfer blocks that have changed since the last backup.

[pinkerton]

Hi,

thanks for your reply. I didn't know that virtual disks can be selcted individually. This means that we can use Data Recovery as intended.

Thanks

Michael