When exploring VCB 1.1 I noticed some new features. One of the most prominent is the option to run VCB from within a VM. I can hear most of you think what’s the point of that and how about that HBA / iSCSI connection you need. Well if it’s of any use I will leave in the middle because I don’t see any reason for virtualizing VCB for larger environments. But for small environments, which don’t have shared storage this can be an easy way to dump their data without resorting to unsupported scripts. VCB is easily setup via the executable, next next finish. Next just edit the config.js which resides in “c:\program files\vmware\vmware consolidated backup\config\”, don’t edit this file with notepad cause it will wreck the layout… use a windows vi editor, notepadd++ or even wordpad.
There are three so called “transport modes”:
- SAN – Is the default option and requires iSCSI or a SAN based VMFS which must be directly accessible from both the ESX and the VCB proxy host.
- NBD – Is the over-the-network protocol to access the virtual harddisks. Data is sent unencrypted over the network to the VCB proxy. Does not require a SAN or iSCSI and is supported within a VM.
- NBDSSL – Well the name already says enough, same as option 2 but data is transferred with the use of SSL, encrypted. Note that this will be slower and will put more stress on the CPU of the ESX Host. Only supported on ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5.
For more info check out the PDF about VCB 1.1 on the VMware website.