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.
April 8th, 2008 at 6:50 am
Hello,
I try the same… VCB 1.1 and Powerpath but I get an error. Have you installed a license (load balancing) or do you run in unlicensed mode (failover) of powerpath? Can you send me your vcb-script or your vcb-command?
Greetings
Thomas
April 9th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Yup, it does work for me too. We are using vcb 1.03 (VMware-vcb-51389.exe) with power path ver4.4. But occasionally we hit some issues where in veritas is not able to backup some VMs.
March 6th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Support for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) and Multipath software.
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1007479