Dell PowerVault DL2000 - Manual (Page 8)

VMware Virtual Machine Protection
8 October 2008
Care needs to be taken when backing up these files to make sure they are backed up in a
consistent manner, assuring that restored files are not corrupt. Before backing up the vmdk files,
all I/O operations to these files must be halted. This can be done either by:
Shutting down each guest virtual machine prior to the backup
Performing snapshots of the virtual machines that can be used for backup
These commands can be used by Backup Exec in a backup job automatically as a pre\post job
command. For complete documentation of all vcbMounter and vcbRestore commands, please see
your ESX documentation on
www.vmware.com
Note: The Backup Exec for Windows Servers RALUS Agent requires ESX 3 or later and will not
install or function correctly on an ESX 2.x server
Backing Up the ESX Service Console Itself
The service console itself (excluding .vmx and .vmdk files) does not typically change often, so
backing up the service console OS does not need to occur very frequently. Additionally, ESXi
versions no longer even include the Service Console. However, in the event of an ESX system
failure, restore operations of the Service Console configuration files could be facilitated if a current
backup of the service console was available. As a point of clarification, the backup of the service
console described in this section would not typically include the .vmx and .vmdk files associated
with a guest OS. These files would be protected separately as mentioned in the previous section
DISADVANTAGES OF BACKUPS WITH RALUS IN SERVICE CONSOLE
The traditional practice of placing backup agents on the virtual machine to perform daily backups
puts extra load on the ESX Server and can impact performance for that ESX Server and for all of
the users connected to virtual machines being hosted by that ESX server.
BASIC SCRIPT-LEVEL VMWARE CONSOLIDATED BACKUP (VCB) BACKUP