Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

BC-DR

Undocumented VCB config.js feature

· ·

One of my customers wanted to use the default VCB framework but did not want to quiesce the VM for several reasons. (Databases, Active Directory etc.) I could not find an option in the config.js file but noticed the following in the file glue.js:

// A fallback to be able to switch to non-quiesced snapshots
if (typeof(NO_QUIESCE) != "undefined") {
cmd +="-Q 0 ";
}

In other words, setting the option “NO_QUIESCE” with no value in config.js results in the VM not being quiesced, default it will quiesce the VM! I added the following line to the  config.js file to accomplish this:

NO_QUIESCE="";

VCB – Weird errors

· ·

Today I encountered a weird error during an implementation of VMware Consolidated Backup. When ever I ran vcbmounter I received the following error:”Run time error – the application the application has requested the Runtime to terminate in an unusual way.”

It seemed that for some reason the vcbuser did not have the role “VMware consolidated backup user” linked anymore. I would have expected an error in the line of “permission denied” or “not enough permissions to complete task” and definitely not a Runtime error…

Anyway I tested the script I blogged about yesterday and it works like a charm, check it out!

VCB – Backup all running VMs

· ·

Today I was busy trying to find out a way to schedule VCB backups with Commvault with just 1 schedule without having to rewrite your script every time someone creates a VM. The standard procedure is to create a subclient for every VM which is very human error prone. I stumbled upon a blog on RTFM about backing up all running VM’s, the actual script was done by Andrew Neilson, thanks! [Read more…] about VCB – Backup all running VMs

New VCB features

· ·

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. [Read more…] about New VCB features

VCB problems with independent disks

· ·

In my RSS reader I noticed a blog on VM/ETC about independent disks and VCB. The thing is, no snapshots are created when a disk is in independent/persistent mode. This can be a problem when you want to use VCB on all your disks. But this can also come in handy when you want to disable a specific disk from being picked up by VCB. For instance a Database server with a 1TB D: disk is probably not a candidate for for VCB in a normal situation. But when setting the D:\ disk in independent/persistent mode this disk will be skipped by VCB because it’s impossible to snapshot a disk that’s in this mode. This way you can dump the C:\ aka System partition and restore the VM in case of disaster recovery more easily.