We tried Consolidated Backup and it's a pain in the neck. You have to copy the 
whole machine to the Windows machine (1 TB VM = 1 TB of storage on the Windows 
machine) before backup up to tape. It also created a ton of SCSI reservations 
and took down our test SAN twice.

We have since opted to putting Bacula client on our ESX host and a series of 
scripts to determine which host a VM is on. Our VMs are backed up straight to 
tape and they stay running with snapshots. I finished up the scripting 
yesterday so we will see how it works on Sunday. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: bacula-users-bounces AT lists.sourceforge DOT net [mailto:bacula-users-
> bounces AT lists.sourceforge DOT net] On Behalf Of Regis A. Despres
> Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2008 4:44 AM
> To: bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
> Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] Slow backup from VMWare
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> In case we're still talkin' about ESX, there's a wonderful stuff called
> VCB (vmware consolidated backup) from VMWare.
> that can make live snapshot (no VM reboot)
> then can make those snapshots available on the Virtual Center.
> It results a kind of really useful "backup proxy" w/ less I/O and better
> "calibrated" network load.
> As i mostly use FreeBSD guests, i only backup full hosts. But it might be
> done diferently w/vmtools (according to the docs).
> Of course freely available from vmware ressources =]
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> --
> Regis A. Despres
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Gregory Orange a écrit :
> |
> | I guess we cheat - we pause the VM for the duration of the backup, and
> | simply back up the host. This results in a complete system backup of the
> | VM, and we get full speed backup of a few large files each night. We can
> | do this happily because none of our VMs are very large - 10GB at most -
> | so not too much tape space is used. Our large data set (~3TB) is not
> | virtualised.
> | When the host is upgraded, or the VMs are moved somewhere other than
> | that SLES9 box[1], we'll have a newer version of LVM such that we can
> | pause the VM, create an LVM snapshot, resume the VM, perform a raw
> | backup of the snapshot, then delete the snapshot. Much less downtime for
> | the VM.
> |
> | [1] For some reason, we can't currently delete LVM snapshots without a
> | lot of work including host reboots. This would require huge disk space
> | wastage or unacceptable reboots!
> |
> | Brian Debelius wrote:
> | > I've never achieved more then about 10MBs from Server running under
> SUSE
> | > 9.  I am moving things to ESX right now.  I have not benchmarked the
> | > raid yet, but a single disk was around 45MBs
> | >
> | > Keith Sudbury wrote:
> | >> Hi Everyone,
> | >>
> | >> I have a CentOS box running a LTO-3 SCSI drive and I am currently
> | >> getting abour 7 / 8 MB/s from a Windows 2003SBS machine running on
> the
> | >> CentOS box. This is the only VM on the box and the server has no
> load.
> | >>
> | >> The box is a new Dell server of reasonable spec and has the Vmware is
> | >> running in "bridged" mode for networking, the drive are SATA and
> | >> confisured in a RAID5 (with a real hw card). I'm not expecting a
> rocket
> | >> but 7mb/s ???
> | >>
> | >> I am wondering if any of you have experianced any thing simular?
> | >>
> | >>
> | >> Many Thanks
> | >>
> | >>
> | >
> | >
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> |
> | --
> |     - ---- -----
> |       Gregory Orange             Phone: +61 8 9387 7955
> |      System Administator            Fax: +61 8 9387 6686
> |     RPS MetOcean                        http://www.rpsmetocean.com.au
> |    System Administrators Guild of Australia  http://www.sage-au.org.au
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