I was just reading up on my Google Reader. A lot of information been dropped over the last couple of days and more and more people are getting active on the VMware blogoshere. One of the articles that really caught my attention was the “VM Template best practices (Linux)” by Leo Raikhman. Leo did a great job in explaining how [...]

VMware just changed their VCB multipathing support. Before the KB article stated “Powerpath and other multipathing software.” The KB article has been changed and contains specific version of Powerpath which are officially supported and the “other multipathing” has been removed. Still I’m no fan of multipathing software on the VCB host, I would prefer using 1 HBA for uploading to [...]

I get this question a lot:”Does the VMware Consolidated Backup proxy host need to have the same LUNs with the same ID’s presented?”.  VMware Consolidated Backup needed to have identical LUN ID’s to be able to match LUN’s but that has changed. It doesn’t matter anymore which LUN ID your host and proxy server see cause VCB just compares VMFS signatures. So [...]

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’ [...]