Backing up vSphere 4 with BE 12.5 AVVI

[hester1598]

Hi,

I'm struggling to find a coniguration guide detailing the steps required to backup a vSphere 4 environment using Backup Exec 12.5 with AVVI. I'm presuming such a document exists?
In particular I'd find it helpful to know if VCB is required to be installed on the Media server and how best to present the ESX LUNs to the Media Server with a view to backup the VMs across the storage network rather that the production LAN.

Thanks

[teiva-boy]

 It's no different than setting up AVVI for ESX3.x.  Same steps.

VCB must be installed to a win2k3 SP2 machine.  For simplicity the media server is easiest, but not required.
You must turn off in diskpart, the automount feature..  You know when you put a new HDD in a server, disk manager wants to write a signature to the new disk?
You must present the LUN's to the VCB proxy, that is your datastore.  You dont have to do anything on the windows side.  dont give it a drive letter, nothing.
You must have a 1:1 ratio if not more for your backup of the VMDK's.

Snapshots are taken by VCB, copied to a folder, and BE then backs up the contents of that snapshot folder.  


This is all moot as BE is getting an update and vSphere will be fully supported...  Woohoo, no more VCB!!!!!

[hester1598]

Many thanks,

When you say "You must have a 1:1 ratio if not more for your backup of the VMDK's" what exactly do you mean?

cheers

[teiva-boy]

 If you are backing up 500GB of VM's.  You should have roughly 500GB's of free space for the staging area that VCB uses for the snapshots.

This is VMware's dirty secret about VCB...  Not clearly written, but a flaw to their design...  WIth vSphere4 and BE2010, it will go away. :)