Configuration

Edit the easyVCB.conf file in the easyVCB directory and adapt the values there to suit your environment. Most users will have to change

$PREFIX

Can be used to set all other easvcb directories if you like our layout.

$BACKUPROOT

to point to where you want to place your backups

$MINFREESPACEBEFORE
$MINFREESPACEAFTER

to adjust the storage management for automated removal of old backups. If set to 0, then the free space management is disabled and easyvcb keeps only the minimum amount of backups.

$BACKUPSTOKEEP

How many old backups should easyvcb keep as a minimum.

VI_SERVER
VI_USERNAME
VI_PASSWORD

environment variables to containt the server and logon credentials for VI3, usually your Virtual Center management server. A user with minimum VCB permissions (see VMware Virtual Machine Backup Guide) should be sufficient.

$EXPORTROOT

to point to a place on the same hard disk where your backup softtware will pick up an export view (see below), or set to empty string to disable the creation of an export view

$LOGRETENTION

How many logs to keep

$VCBARGS

should be modified to reflect the VCB access method available (SAN or NBD). See the comments in the config file for more details.

$MAILSERVER
$MAILTO
$MAILFROM

the usual email settings to receive email reports

$MAILLEVEL

When to send an email. Supported options are:

• full Send full log
• summary Send summary and error & warning messages
• warning Send a mail only if errors or warnings occured
• error Send a mail only if erros occured

Please keep in mind that this file will be parsed by perl and that you have to conform with perl syntax. You can check your syntax with "perl -c easyVCB.conf"

Programs

easyVCB comes with three main programs:

easyVCB.pl

is the main program - it backups the VMs

easyVCB-find.pl

is a utility to list VMs

diskfree.pl

is a utility that displays the free disk space

General Usage

Run easyVCB.pl with the desired arguments (see below) selecting VMs and it will create a backup of the selected VMs (or all VMs if run without arguments !)

Full log can be found in the configured $LOGROOT location with daily subdirectories for each VM (there you will find the vcbmounter log).

Run easyVCB-find.pl to try out the VM selection without actually creating a backup.

Run diskfree.pl to see how much disk space if available (this number might differ from what Windows shows you in Explorer, but this number is relevant for easyVCB).

Virtual Machine Selection

The main purpose of easyVCB is to backup selected VM. Therefore, the main command line parameters relate to the selection of VMs, thus allowing a single easyVCB configuration to be used for different backup schemes (e.g. different VM every day). VMs can be selected by their object path (this is the internal Virtual Center representation) and/or by a custom attribute (by tag). Run easVCB-find.pl for examples of how the object paths look for your environment and notice the similarity with your Virtual Center VM Folders.

Both methods can be combined in which case both requirements apply together.

Examples:

easyVCB.pl --tag

This will backup all VMs that have a true value (1, true or yes) set in the custom attribute "easyVCB"

easyVCB.pl --tag easyVCB-monday

Same as before, but the tag is now "easyVCB-monday"

easyVCB.pl "Democenter/vm/Discovered Virtual Machine"

This will backup all VM in the VM Folder "Discovered Virtual Machine"

easyVCB-find.pl "Democenter/vm/Discovered Virtual Machine" --tag
easyVCB-find.pl --tag easyVCB "Democenter/vm/Discovered Virtual Machine"

These two are equivalent. Note that --tag has to be the last argument to imply the default custom attribute of "easyVCB". Otherwise you MUST specify the attribute name !

easyVCB-find.pl LAN/vm/Testing DMZ/vm/Testing

This would backup all VM in a Testing VM-Folder in 2 separate datacenters LAN and DMZ.

Just try various combinations with easyVCB-find.pl to get the hang of it.

Storage Management

The purpose of storage management is to keep your backup disk as full as possible by removing old backups only as much as is needed to make space for new ones.

To optimizse storage management you must tell easyVCB how large your typical and your largest backup might be. MINFREESPACEBEFORE should be at least as large as your typical backup. MINFREESPACEAFTER should be even larger. This will "punish" a VM with a very large backup by keeping proportionally less backups for this VM.

BACKUPSTOKEEP is the lower limit of backups that will never be deleted — even if your system will run out of disk space during a VCB backup.

Export View

The purpose of Export Views is to feed a 3rd party software with the current VM images under the same location. This contradicts with the date-based directory structure that easyVCB creates to hold the VMs.

If you set EXPORTROOT then easyVCB will create a current "view" of all VMs it worked on to be copied by another backup software (e.g. to tape). This view is created using (NTFS) hardlinks so that all data will appear as duplicate to the original data in BACKUPROOT, but it does not occupy disk space.

Each run of easyVCB updates the directories in EXPORTROOT with hardlinks to the current version (most recent backup) in BACKUPROOT.

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last modified 2008-07-08 04:51:02

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