What is VMware Data Recovery?
The VMware Data Recovery appliance is a downloadable virtual machine/appliance that can be used to backup VMs. It works with the new vSphere4 technology, and intergrates directly with vCenter4. It’s a pretty cool bit of technology. Don’t get me wrong though, it does not mean the end of VCB – but a complement to it. It’s really pitched at the SMB market – giving them an easy backup tool. Why at the SMB market? Well, number one it does not scale to 1,000′s of VMs – and also it will not backup or restore an individual word/excel file inside a VM. OUCH!
What is good about VDR is that it will do deltas of the virtual disk – so first backup is normal, subsequent backups are differential. AND, it will also de-duplicate the data! NICE!
If you want to learn more about VDR, I wrote a little getting started PDF which you can download here:
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May 25th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Hi,
quick update: it looks like the file level restore is possible for windows VM:
# File level full and incremental backup. Save incremental changes and enable an efficient backup window.
# Image level and individual file restore. Recover entire virtual machine image in the event of a disaster (for virtual machines running any operating system) and recover individual files and directories (for virtual machines running Microsoft® Windows operating system).
http://www.vmware.com/products/data-recovery/features.html
Dedup backup kind of eliminate the need of file level backup (I said “kind of”
)
May 25th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
as always, thanks mike!
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:33 pm
“Well, number one it does not scale to 1,000’s of VMs – and also it will not backup or restore an individual word/excel file inside a VM. OUCH!”
In order to overcome the above scalability and features esXpress is doing backups without the VCB using Virtual appliances since 2006.
Breezy File level recovery supported for both Windows and Linux VMs
Source side de duplication : unlinke any destination based de dup
And scalability to support as many VMs an ESX would support. Upto 16 concurrent backup threads in parallel per ESX host.
Cheers
June 12th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Yes esXpress do it already but sometimes it is a pain with esXpress. Slow restore for many users because the restore is still running in the service console of the vmserver.(Backup of 350 GB in 2 1/2 hour, restore of this machine takes 14 hours) One year ago they support guys of esxpress tell me it is my enviroment but many other user have the same problem. Then the tell me that the restore will move in a virtual machine and this will fix the problem. But still today nothing happens.
Now esXpress 3.5 was released including dedup.. but it is usable for me because the backup speed is very slow.. again i was told thats my enviroment but it’s not true and some other users have exactly the same problem.Had run several performance test and everything is ok.. no performance problem with traditional file level backups etc.. nothing.. If you write the facts to there forum and they like not to read.. the entry is deleted. If you complain about that the entry is deleted if you write them by mail and you make critics on the software and the manner of support you got rude answers..
And the biggest point is.. if a new VMWAre Version is released you can not to be sure that the current esXpress is running on it..and then you have to wait for a compatible version for weeks or in rare cases for month… so i am very happy that VMWare release a own VCB free solution!
July 9th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
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