BC-DR

VCB – Weird errors

Duncan Epping · Jan 31, 2008 ·

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

Duncan Epping · Jan 30, 2008 ·

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

Duncan Epping · Jan 15, 2008 ·

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

Duncan Epping · Jan 11, 2008 ·

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.

VMware Consolidated Backup and deleted files

Duncan Epping · Jan 4, 2008 ·

As most of you know, when VMware Consolidated Backup dumps image level backups VCB only dumps used diskspace. Unfortunately for us VCB does this by checking at block level if it contains only zero’s or not. If it contains only zero’s the block is considered empty, but an Operating System doesn’t zero out the disk space that contained the files when a file is deleted. An Operating System only clears the pointers to these files. This is why you could have a disk with only 4GB of used space and a 6GB VCB dump. As of ESX 3.0.2 update 1 VMware reintroduced the shrink option in VMware Tools. Kind of a weird name “shrink” cause the vmdk doesn’t actually shrink, the unused space is just zeroed out.