Big Little VMware Update (VCB and iSCSI!)

August 3, 2007 by Stephen Leave a Comment

VMware released version 1.0.3 of VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) today. While a minor software rev wouldn’t normally warrant a blog post, this is anything but minor.

VCB was a good idea, but implementation experience found it lacking. For one thing, it didn’t support iSCSI, which is a major omission in the world of Windows and VMware! This alone probably accounted for much of the slow uptake of the feature. I can imagine Marc Farly is warming up the blogging software as we speak!

But there were other problems, now fixed. It couldn’t recognize a LUN if it was presented with a different LUN ID than it had on the virtual machine, and it left old snapshots hanging around if the backup failed. I don’t use it, but users complained to me about these issues.

Note that you have to upgrade VirtualCenter and ESX Server at the same time, which may not appeal to everyone…

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