BE2010 and VMWare: best practice help (BEVSS vs VMware VSS)

[Mike-Wall]

VMware is ESX 4.0 U1

I have 10 virtual machine's (mix of windows 2003 or 2008). When the vm's were built they had VMware Tools installed including the VMware VSS provider option. Each vm also has Remote Agents for Windows Systems (RAWS) installed. I use Backup Exec 2010 to do a daily backup of the system state and important files on each server - This is usually fine and the backups complete successfully, but occasionally I get a failed backup and it's nearly always a VSS error.

On a weekly basis I also backup the vm's using vRranger. Again, this usually works, but I commonly get a VSS quiesce timeout issue.

I understand from this document (http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/352025.htm) that the VMware VSS provider gets uninstalled when RAWS is installed.

The same document also says "VMware Snapshot Provider is sufficient for backup" if you don't need to use GRT. Well, other than for Exchange, I don't need to use GRT, so having removed RAWS from a test server I then noticed I'm no longer able to select the 'Shadow Copy Components' and 'System State' when making a selection for a backup job. It seems I need RAWS for my daily back ups, but I'm sure I also need the VMware VSS provider for my vRanger backups.

Therefore, my question is what are others doing? Our setup must be a very typical. 

Thanks

PS: Although I've looked at the Agent for VMware, this would seem to duplicate the work of vRanger so I understand it's not something that would help in this situation.

[sksujeet]

Hi Mike,

I would like to explain how it works. With the virtual vmware license you can backup all the virtual machines in the ESX host. When you backup this way you can select the GRT option but irrespective of GRT selected OR NOT  you can't see the individual items in the backup like c,d, system state or shadow copy. If you have the GRT selected for the backup you will be able to restore the individual files in the restore but not the system state and shadow copy componenets. And in case of disaster you have to restore the complete VM. Now if you are installing RAWS on every machine then the whole purpose of AVVI license gets defeated as you will be doing a backup as physical machine backup.

The raws needs to be installed only on database machines where you want GRT like SQL, Exchange so that remote agent can have its metadata clear the logs and provide you a GRT view of individual mailboxes or sql database. Please let us know if it answers your question? 

[Mike-Wall]

Hi,

Thanks for replying but I'm sorry I don't fully understand your answer. Let me see if I've got it right? Please put a correct, or wrong, next to each Question.

Q1. If I use AAVI and select GRT, I can select ndividual items as well as the system state and shadow copy components to go into the backup?
Q2. But I will only be able to restore the files, not the system state or shadow copy components?
Q3. If there is a disaster, I can restore the whole vm from the AVVI backup?

Mike.