Simple question - Telling virtual disks apart for VDR

[RyanWatters]

Have a server that has some virtual disks that are located on my lower speed drives in my SAN, and some disks that are in my higher speed disks on my SAN. So my VM has the following drives:

HD1 - 25GB vmname/vmname-WS.vmdk

HD2 - 20GB vmname/vmname-WS_1.vmdk

HD3 - 15GB vmname/vmname-WS_2.vmdk

HD4 - 200GB vmname/vmname-WS.vmdk

HD1 and HD2 are the disks that I'm interested in backing up. HD3 and HD4 are just full of databases that I have being backed up by our main backup structure. When I go to add a backup job for that VM in my Data Recovery console, it gives me the choice of backing up the following drives:

vmname-WS.vmdk

vmname-WS.vmdk

vmname-WS_1.vmdk

vmname-WS_2.vmdk

One of those vmname-WS.vmdk's is a 25GB drive that I do want to back up, the other is a 200GB drive that I do not want to back up.... How do I tell which is which?

[RParker]

Shutdown the VDR, edit each of the hard drives. Where are they located? That should identify which belongs to which.

[RyanWatters]

Heh. You know I figured that would be the answer, just always hopeful there's a way to get around shutting down my production SQL server to rename a drive. I'll wait on that one until I can next schedule a maintenance then. I suppose the other option is to just pick one and if it guessed wrong, VDR will allow me to nuke out the backed up data, won't it?

[MattseG2 · Accepted solution]

Of course you can.

1. Mark the corresponding restore point for deletion during next integrity check if you're sure that it's being the wrong drive.

2. Go to configuration/targets and start a manual integrity check on the target for deletion being executed near time.

3. After integrity check completes remove the wrong drive from your backup task and put the right one in.

But pay attention to the fact that only complete restore points can be selcted for deletion, not a single drive out of it.

So you shold start the backup task after re-configuration immediately to have a new backup being done near time.

And that's it.

[AndreTheGiant]

You have the storevmname/vmname-WS.vmdk repeat two time.

How is it possible? Check the name or check if storevmname is different.

Andre

[RyanWatters]

The two same named drives are residing in two different storage areas. So while both are named vmname-WS.vmdk, their proper full paths are vmname/vmname-WS.vmdk, and the other is vmname/vmname-WS.vmdk. So while you generally couldn't have two drives with the same name, these are in two completely different directories in two different storage pools on the SAN. If I could see the store the drives are attached to in VDR, it wouldn't be an issue, but all it gives me are the vmdk names.

[admin]

In the next release of VDR, we will display both the VM name and its associated datastore during backup job creation. But in VDR 1.1 or earlier, you will need to know this metadata before backup job creation.

[admin]

VDR 1.2 was released today and will show the datastore for the virtual disks in the backup wizard. More info about the release here

http://blogs.vmware.com/uptime/2010/06/new-vdr-release-out-today.html