I agree entirely that "VCB" and "beauty" together does not compute, and the
2-phase vmdk restore is dorky.

But regarding the backup cycle, there is an "in between" option most TSM
folks can use without taking the hit of two complete backups ("virtual
drive" and "image" as described below) daily.

TSM has a "restore if newer" option.
Suppose you do your image backups weekly (and that's the one with the
biggest hit on your infrastructure, because it's the entire vmdk image), and
just your progressive incrementals daily.

You can put back the virtual machine by restoring the .vmdk image, then use
the "restore if newer" option to apply the incrementals back on top of the
.vmdk image.  Yes, it will take a bit longer, and more tape mounts.  But
many people, for a large number of their systems, will be able to get
sufficient coverage that way, without taking the hit of doing those full
image backups every day.

Just another strategy.

W




On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 7:48 PM, W. Curtis Preston <wcplists1 AT gmail DOT 
com>wrote:

> john D. Schneider said:
>
> >The beauty of VCB is that it doesn't require a client install on each
> >machine; there is less administration per VM, which means less time.
>
> Hmmm. Not sure I'd use "beauty" and "VCB" in the same sentence. ;)  I
> usually say that VCB stands for Very Complicated Backup. ;)
>
> I'm not defending the Avamar method.  I'm just saying the VCB method is not
> all that great either -- regardless of which backup product is using it.
>
> With most backup software, you generally have two options with VCB. One
> option mounts the virtual disk as a drive letter on the proxy server
> allowing you to do progressive incrementals against it.  (I'll call this
> the
> virtual drive method.)  The other method copies the VMDK in its entirety to
> the proxy machine's staging disk; this copy is then copied again when it is
> backed up via TSM or any other backup software.  I'll call this the image
> method.
>
> The virtual drive method is alright, but gives you no way to recover a VM.
> The image method allows you to recover the VM, but it requires two full
> backups every night.  While you are right about moving the load off the ESX
> server, don't forget the load you're placing on your storage infrastructure
> doing two full backups every night if you choose the image methohd.  And
> don't forget that doing a restore requires two steps as well: restoring to
> the proxy server then copying from the proxy server to the ESX server.
>
> My summary statement is that I think that all VMware backup options kind of
> stink right now (short of moving your VMware filesystems to a N-series
> filer
> and doing SnapManager for VI).  I therefore think that people interested in
> (but not yet using) VCB should wait until TSM supports vSphere, which gets
> rid of the stupid two-step backup and two-step restore.
>
> Just my $0.02.
>