The Systems Engineer » vcb http://www.thesystemsengineer.com structured chaos Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:32:04 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 VMWare VCB and EMC PowerPath http://www.thesystemsengineer.com/technical/vmware-vcb-and-emc-powerpath/ http://www.thesystemsengineer.com/technical/vmware-vcb-and-emc-powerpath/#comments Sat, 29 Mar 2008 01:31:18 +0000 Trace http://www.thesystemsengineer.com/?p=14

VMware Consolidated Backup is going to continue to mature into a great solution for backing up VM’s. Some of the early adopters may have experienced problems with centralized storage. If you have more than one path to your centralized storage it has been recommended in VMWare’s documentation that you disable all inactive paths. This to me does not seem acceptable as part of the reason you paid for your highly available storage was for it to be “HIGHLY AVAILABLE”. This was a big issue for me.

VMWare VCB 1.1.0 apparently works fine with PowerPath. I have configured this and I am currently backing up about 20 guests. I am using Windows 2003 SP2 and PowerPath 5.1.0. The version of VCB I am using is exactly VMware-vcb-64559. I am also using Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5.0.4

I am unsure if VCB and PowerPath are officially supported yet. I am unable to find any documentation on VMWare’s site that says it is supported. I am also unable to find anything in release notes or the forums. It was recommended to me by vmware support to see if it resolved a disk access issue we seemed to randomly be having. I’m happy to say that after installing PowerPath I am able to backup all of my vm’s I have in vmlist so far. I would try it in a lab environment for a bit. I’d be interested to hear if it works for anyone else.

]]> http://www.thesystemsengineer.com/technical/vmware-vcb-and-emc-powerpath/feed/ 3 VMWare Consolidated Backup and TSM http://www.thesystemsengineer.com/technical/vmware-consolidated-backup-and-tsm/ http://www.thesystemsengineer.com/technical/vmware-consolidated-backup-and-tsm/#comments Mon, 10 Mar 2008 01:04:25 +0000 Trace http://yarnyoga.com/syseng/?p=6
VCB is slowly evolving into a product I may actually feel safe using. Friday I had a ticket opened with VMWare because I could not get VCB to correctly mount a virtual machines vmdk for backup. At first the problem looked to me as though vcb did not actually see the LUN. I double checked my SAN configurations and was confident it was a VMWare problem. One test we used was manually mounting the lun with vcbmounter. When we started to use mountvm to see if we could mount the vmdk, someone in the background asked what backup agent and version we used. I told the engineer to tell them we used Tivoli Storage Manager 5.4.0.2.

The distant voice let us know that 5.5 was out and had some special support for vcb. I have had 5.5.0.0 deployed for some clients already and the server was currently running 5.5.0.0 as well. The distant voice came on the line and let me know how cool the support in 5.5.0.0 was. I had already begun taking over the webex session and installing the 5.5.0.0 client on the vcb server. He let me know of a problem where tsm baclient 5.5.0.0 and VCB 1.1.0.64559 do not automaticcly create the directories needed for mounting the lun. If you manaully create the directories it will delete them when VCB cleans up, leaving you with no directories again for next backup. I found the fix for this issue, it’s a maintainence release for 5.5.0.0. TSM baclient 5.5.0.4 is what you need to be upgraded to. This PDF talks about using VCB with Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5 check out page 329 in the document which is 347 of 402 in the pdf.

The APAR IC54709 is included as a fix in 5.5.0.4. You can download the patch here that will take you to 5.5.0.4.

A few features I feel are key:
1. The VCB server backs up the virtual machines using proxynode. This means that you can install an agent on the virtual machines and do file level restores as if they were backed up like normal.
2. License savings for TSM if your VCB server requires less licensing than your physical ESX servers.

Once you setup everything and create a vmlist file with all of your virtual machines. The only thing left is using a macro in your schedules to run “dsmc backup vm”. The product seems to work pretty good after that. I’ll try to test some restores next week and let you all know how that turns out. I’m very interested in keeping an eye on VCB as it develops and I certianly appreciate the intergration that Tivoli and VMWare are providing.

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