Basically my VMware Data Recovery configuration are mounted on Linux Samba network share at “\\xx.xx.xx.44\oper” and “\\xx.xx.xx.44\share” as you can see below.

Without future changes make on VDR appliance box, I can easily login with default userID: root and followed by standard Linux command: mount and I can found network share password display on the screen which mean password disclose here.

Personally I do not think this is the best way due to security reason and I would suggest VMware engineer make according changes on it. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Since the day VMware had launched the VCB to the public which promising to deliver the real solution for backup related. I am really followed up the news since the day they declare the roadmap until it get down to the market of the release.

I should say I am disappointed with the VCB abilities today as I do believe to get VCB work, there had been too much extra cost had needed to be incurred to our investment. As you may aware, I believe the most popular backup software now days which fully integrated well with VCB in the market, which had been demo LIVE during the VMworld year 2007 is only Symantec Netbackup. To setup the POC and test is not too tough in this case, but I started realize as it didn’t really justify the amount of money I should put in to my backup environment.

As for most of the VMs in production today which had been considered critical and important, but it still not as important as the physical DB or ERP servers which run in production. To have VCB in place, the TCO is higher than using the standard Netbackup we currently.

There is additional enterprise licenses require for Netbackup, and additional licenses required on the Windows 2003 Servers. (Personally I hope they can do something same on Open source Linux world ). Beside Software licensing and subscription, you may face another major issue which you need to have a big amount of storage stage in the environment to allow VCB to work with the VM. If you had 5 TB data in VM farm, you may need to have 5TB for staging to support the VCB, this seems to be too much. When I perform the cost analysis with features and ROI, I can’t really make my head shake up to propose this to our global solution in the technical roadmap.

We keep practice about green IT and cost effective, but this type of solution will not be fit to our direction at this point of time. If we do compare with deduplication such as Avamar or Data Domain with Netbackup, it will seem more benefits Vs the VCB in this case. I may still keep an eye on the next version of VCB from VMware, which seems they will make some improvement for the next release.

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