Why not backing up the VM with VCB
Posted by craig 
- on August 26th, 2008 in VCB, Virtualization | 4 Comments »
VCB is Cool? But it may not Cool for me.
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.
4 Responses
I believe VCB has a direct fiber backup option, where you don’t need to invest as much in storage. It is a good option to consider if you have fiber connected SAN and fiber connected connected tape drives. If you don’t have those.. I agree that the entry costs are pretty high. When I was looking at it.. I considered implementing a strategy that would do full vmdk backups once a week and snapshots the other days, allowing me to rotate the backups using 1/5 of the storage – but then we found the direct fiber option, and we have been pursuing that now.
Yes, I am agree with the point you had raised here. Basically I had been to the situation as you had stated before this, when I found out that the TCO for the entire VCB for my environment is too high, I am start to look for alternative solution, which still not yet finalized at this moment. Some how I will say if we can come to 1 solution for both VM and physical, and that will be absolutely fantastic
We were searching on such product that is “best of both world”, we found one that is “agentless”-based (backup VM file-level without chocking the ESX), and integrate well with VCB for vmdk backup with dedupe function. And the backup is disk-based (no VTL or tape) and finally it is capacity pricing (on online agent charges). It is called Asigra Televaulting. Check this out : http://asigra.dciginc.com/2008/06/televaulting-now-autodiscovers.html
not a bad stuff according to the link you sent. But I am not sure it had been exist in Malaysia yet