Vmware Data Recovery Performance

We use VMWares Data Recovery as a backup for our vSphere infrastructure, now I know a lot of people do not consider this a robust backup solution and use other agents for that role, we had to make do with what we had in this case and make this work for us.

As an application when it works, it works well and I can restore a server to a point in time and I can mount restore points to replace files that have been changed, usually I use Shadow Copy for this but there are those users who have changed a file months ago or need it for a retention reason.

The problem with DR comes with the Integrity Checks and Catalog of the DeDupe Storage, I use 1TB VMDK files on NFS NAS because I need to store multiple backups and DR only supports two destinations at once so I need to get the most out of them in terms of capacity.

Often I will find my backups have failed because they have exceeded their time window due to the destination running a daily Integrity Check and the check on a 1TB NFS VMDK takes a long time to finish.

So what can be done, well one is to try to limit the Integrity checks to once a week and this can be done by editing the Data Recovery Appliance from the Linux console.

So the first thing to do is to logon to the appliance so open the appliance from the console and use the default credentials of "root" and "vmw@re" But be aware the keyboard may well be mapped to US so the @ symbol will actually be the " on a a UK keyboard.

Once logged on you can then create the INI file with the command

vi /var/vmware/datarecovery/datarecovery.ini

In this file you can then add the header [Options}

Then to change the Integrity check Interval enter on its own line

IntegrityCheckInterval=7

To close the file and save enter :q!

There are multiple other options available and you can read about those here

http://bit.ly/qFHj2J

http://bit.ly/oKwn3I