EVA 8000 snapshot and VMFS

[grahame lancaster]

I apologise for what is probably a stupid question but can't seem to find a an answer !.

We have all our VMs using Virtual Disks on the EVA. We can snapshot and snapclone the VMFS LUNS without problems

My question is - how do we archive these off to tape ? We can sucessfully present test VMFS LUNS to a windows box but of course we know windows cant see the data. Any help much appreciated

[Ivan Ferreira]

The solution is known as "VMware Consolidated Backup"

Please see:

http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/consolidated_backup.html

http://h41267.www4.hp.com/filelib/de/de/633081878093103750_b432786259d0ab57fcd1a0e657a1e723.pdf

[grahame lancaster]

Yes thanks for that, we are currently testing this with Arcserve, I'm obviously missing something.

How can I get the whole EVA SNAPSHOT VMFS LUN snapshot off onto tape (containing many VMs Virtual Disks). We need this for DR

I relaise ypu can use vcb mounter to target individual VMs and files within those VMs, are you saying you can use VCB mounter to backup the entire EVA snapshot ?

[Ivan Ferreira]

Yes, the Windows Proxy is able to mount the hardware snapshot and backup the files. The Data Protector slides describe how it works, even if you don't use Data Protector, it will give you a picture about how the proxy server works.

I don't like this method because you must present the LUN to the windows proxy, and this has no knowledge of what is running on there. If someone do a mistake, you can corrupt data on the VM disks.

[Rob Leadbeater]

That link got broken for some reason... Try here:

http://h41267.www4.hp.com/filelib/de/de/633081878093103750_b432786259d0ab57fcd1a0e657a1e723.pdf

Cheers,
Rob

[Uwe Zessin · Accepted solution]

VCB cannot do a block copy of a VMFS volume.

You can do a file backup by mounting NTFS-formatted volumes on the proxy.

You can do an 'image backup' by saving, for example, a complete VM. Example attached.

[grahame lancaster]

Thanks for the clarification and example UWE,,

We had got to the point of your example using vcbmounter ok. Now onto the restore !


(we have tried using VMware convertor but keep getting errors "unable to determine guest operating system"

[Uwe Zessin]

I was able to push the data back. I've used Converter 3.0.1 and created a new VM through Virtual Center. Some descriptions said that one has to rename the VMDK export and change the .vmx. I don't recall I did that, but unfortunately, I don't remember all details, right now, sorry.

If you just want to recover the virtual disk(s). You could try to mount a CIFS-share on the proxy and import the VMDK via VMKFSTOOLS - I'll attach a sample session. Hope it helps.

[grahame lancaster]

Yes thanks for that mate.

Think we may have discovered some kind of bug when doing the renaming with vmkfstools after vcbmounter has run. Either that or something perculir to our environment.

When you do the rename with vkmfstools to get rid of the scsi bit (eg. rename scsi0-0-0-vcbtest2.vmdk to vcbtest2.vmdk )it appears to work ok and renames that and the other disks,, but it adds an extra "." to the name.

VMware convertor then fails because it is looking for vcbtest2.vmdk when in fact vmkfstools had renamed it to vcbtest2..vmdk

We had to remove the extra . within windows and voila - it worked !


If none of that makes sense then all I'm saying is check the there isn't 2 dots. We've tried the test twice and both times noticed this.
We're running the lateset version. of esx 3.0.2