Issue with VCB not working

[drpepper2011101]

Hello-

I've been using VCB 1.5 update 2 for doing some backups of a few VMs and up until I upgraded my hosts to 4.1 update 1 (8.3.7 build 381511) and subsequently my VM's to the news VM tools things worked well.  All of my VM's are running Windows 2008 R2.

Once I updated to the latest VMTools, I started getting the "Error: Failed to open the disk: NBD_ERR_GENERIC" error.  Researching it points to disabling "disk.EnableUUID", which does work, but its my understanding doing that disables application based Quiesce, which I need because of the servers is running a database.

As I troubleshot the issue, I found if I rolled back the version of VMTools back to the latest version of the 4.0 tools (4.0.0 build 398348), VCB starts working again with "disk.EnableUUID" set to True while running on the 4.1 host (just yells at me that my tools version is out of date).

Is there any other work around I haven't found yet to this or am I stuck running the older version of VMTools until a newer version comes out to test?

Thanks!

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

Support for VCB is going away in favor of the storage APIs. Rather than waiting to see if there is a fix I would start looking at a different way to back up. Many of the backup products have added support for using the APIs. If you are licensed for it I would also have a look at the VDR appliance. http://vmware.com/go/data-recovery

[drpepper2011101]

Well, not the answer I wanted to hear but it at least gives me some direction now.

I have the latest version of Backup Exec with licensing to backup VM's.  Last time I tried to make it work I ran into issues with it not being able to access the virtual machine's disk, but I didn't look into it much beyond that since I already had my VCB scripts in place.  I'll have to re-visit that now.  I'll look into VDR as well.

Thanks.

[DSTAVERT]

The latest BE does support the APIs. You can take advantage of change block tracking which should cut down on time. Make sure the VMs are all at hardware version 7 to use CBT.

You may want to consider using vDR alongside BE. vDR can store a lot of backup points in a very small space since it does dedupe and CBT.