-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of Charles E. Heizer
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 1:49 PM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU 
Subject: [Networker] Backing up ESX VM's using vcb

Hello,
I'm trying to backup my VMWare ESX environment and I have followed the
instructions and it looks like it tries to start but I keep getting a
weird
error...

02/22/08 10:43:37 nsrd: savegroup info:
vmgmt01.llnl.gov:VM:source01.llnl.gov: No full backups of this save set
were

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hi Charles

We're backing up ESX using this method, have to say i'm not that impressed, it 
seems very flaky, we get quite a few failed backups for various reasons. Just 
upgraded our Dev env to networker 7.4.1 ESX 3.5 and will be seeing if there are 
any improvements in the reliability, if not I'll be looking at ESXexpress or 
similar..

Our live setup is as follows:
Networker 7.1
ESX 3.0.2

Client setup is as follows 
client is the windows proxy server
Then
save set VM<vmguestname>:*FULL*
backup command save_vcb.bat


This does a full image level backup of the guest.

I don't like the windows proxy being involved, we have seen corruption of a vms 
file system due to windows overwriting the partition table. Also we can only 
backup a limited number of vm guests at any one time so scheduling backups is a 
pita.
If your windows admins create snapshots on the vm guest this can cause backup 
failures, when the backups fail we occasionally get snapshots left which have 
to be manually cleared down.

We find ESX very very useful but I do wish the backups were more reliable!!

Hope this makes sense!

Andy

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