5 Questions I Ask Every Customer about their VMware Backup Strategy

I can’t remember of a technology platform that provided better APIs than VMware’s VADP API framework. While it has had annoying bugs periodically, overall the APIs made it extremely simple, easy, and efficient for VMware VM backups. It’s no wonder, there are a huge amount of backup product vendors that all claim features like application consistent and incremental forever backup (using VMware Change Block Tracking (CBT)) and instant recovery of VMs. There really is very little competitive differences now between these products! All 25+ vendors are all calling the same library for CBT capture. But what really matters in terms of costs and RTO is where and how you store that backup data and metadata. In this cloud era, it’s hard not to consider the cloud as a target to store backups and reduce data centre footprint and costs for backup…

Updated Post – vSphere ESXi6.0 CBT (VADP) bug that affects incremental backups / snapshots.

VMware recently posted a new KB article 2136854 to advertise the issue. Which is great that this has finally been accepted and advertised to customers and partners. It’s important to know this is not the same one as posted recently also for ESXi 6.0 (KB 2114076) – now fixed in a re-issued build of ESXi 6.0 (Build 2715440) But it is very similar to KB 2090639 from a historical perspective. The Issue If you are leveraging a product that uses VMware’s VADP for backup, then chances are you are leveraging this for not just initial fulls, but regular incremental snapshots (for backup purposes). There are numerous products on the market that leverage this API, it’s virtually the industry standard to use this feature as it results in faster backups. When the incremental changes are being requested through the API (QueryDiskChangedAreas) the API is requested changed blocks, but unfortunately some of the changed blocks aren’t…