Introduction
easyVCB is a backup software to be used with VMware Infrastructure 3 or vSphere 4 and VMware Consolidated Backup. The purpose of easyVCB is to create a full image backup of (all) Virtual Machines in a farm of ESX 3/4 servers. To this effect easyVCB provides the backup logic and storage management missing with plain VCB as shipped by VMware.
easyVCB has been developed to create a complete disaster recovery process chain based on VCB and modifies the VMs after the backup to prepare for a disaster recovery deployment to VMware Server and VMware ESX Server.
easyVCB is intended to be installed and used on the VCB proxy server.
How It Works
easyVCB combines five major features into one product:
- select VMs to backup according to datastore path or special tag
- use vcbmounter to copy the VM from the ESX server to the VCB proxy
- remove old backups when the backup disk gets full
- convert the VM to be compatible with VMware Server / Player / Workstation
- optimize the VM to run better in a disaster recovery environment
With these features easyVCB can be used as a stand-alone backup software that will keep a copy of (all) VMs with as many historic versions as there is disk space available.
For instant disaster recovery it is possible to simply start a VM on the VCB proxy host using the modified .VMX file created by easyVCB. More complex disaster recovery scenarios can also be easily implemented.
Further Reading & Getting Started
To understand the design goals behind easyVCB please take a look at my talk about VMware Business Continuity und Disaster Recovery Lösungen (in German, but has lots of graphics) where I introduced the concept of the NO RESTORE SOLUTION and explained why easyVCB was necessary to implement it.
Please read the following documentation files in this order:
We also keep a list of things that we and others would like to see in easyVCB in source:trunk/WISHLIST.TXT
Download the latest easyVCB release from https://sourceforge.net/project/easyvcb/files
What about VDR?
easyVCB was developed at the times of ESX 3. Now, with vSphere ESX 4 we also have VMware Data Recovery, but there are significant differences between the design concepts of easyVCB and VDR:
- VDR is a "closed box" solution, you don't have any control over the internals. easyVCB is free and Open Source and you can see exactly how it works.
- VDR costs money (not shipped with all vSphere license levels). easyVCB is free and Open Source.
- VDR requires you to copy the VM back before you can switch it on. easyVCB is made for "instant disaster recovery" by switching on the backup VM
- VDR brought a new method for doing incremental block-level copies of VMs, easyVCB relies on VMware Consolidated Backup and does full backups only
- VDR uses a helper VM for data transfers. easyVCB requires a VCB server (can be VM, but faster with hardware).
- VDR keeps the backup data in a proprietary format. easyVCB uses plain VMX and VMDK files for the VMs so that they can be used with any VMware (or even other) hypervisor.
- easyVCB offers multiple recovery scenarios for different levels of disasters.
- easyVCB offers cost-effective concepts for off-site disaster recovery.
Since VMware announced that VCB will not be supported for future (major) releases of vSphere it would be interesting to re-implement the ideas behind easyVCB based on the vSphere APIs. However, I do not know whether VMware opened the VDR functionality to API developers, please let me know if you find out something. And yes, of course it would be nice to run easyVCB on Linux instead of Windows :-)
Finally
easyVCB is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3 or later.
If you like easyVCB please feel free to drop me note or get me something from my Amazon Wishlist
