Most of you probably knew that it is impossible to snapshot an independent/persistent disk. And if you didn’t, in short: a disk that is in “independent/persistent” mode can’t be snapshot because it needs to write it’s changes immediately to the virtual harddisk. When using a snapshot(nonpersistent) writes go to a delta file. So as I said in this article, using this [...]

The VCB best practices document has been revised. So be sure to download it and use the latest best practices.

VMware just dropped the news that the future version of VCB will not be an installable anymore. VCB will be an API. This will save you that additional (proxy) host that it will normally cost you. This probably also means that software vendors can take the full advantage of their own unique abilities like deduplication, direct restore into a VM… [...]

I’ve been doing VMware Consolidated Backup troubleshooting for the last couple of days. A customer ran into problems that I can’t comment on at this moment. But after an upgrade of VCB 1.1 to VCB 1.5 the customer ran into a new limitation of VCB. After 30 VM’s the script stopped working, the following error was thrown at us: ‘vcbMounter’ [...]

VMware released a 232 page PDF titled “A Practical Guide to Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery with VMware Infrastructure” This VMware® VMbook focuses on business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) and is intended to guide the reader through the step-by-step process to set-up a multisite VMware Infrastructure that is capable of supporting BCDR services for designated virtual machines at time [...]

One of the best new VCB features is SSPI Authentication. Consolidated Backup can now authenticate using SSPI when it is configured to connect to VirtualCenter. With SSPI, passwords do not need to be stored as plain text in config.js. SSPI is also used for the passthrough authentication that VirtualCenter supports as of 2.5 U2.

If you just upgraded to 3.5 Update 2 and updated VMware tools and want to use VSS for snapshotting than you will have to enable this manually for each VM: In the VMware Tools installer, select Modify > Drivers > VSS. Complete the installation process. Restart the virtual machine to make sure VSS components are installed and running.