VMware Data Recovery (vDR) for Home Lab

Overview

My goal was to backup my current VMware environment running on my NetApp FAS270 to a cheap 1TB SATA disk that is attached to the ESX host.  Space is at a premium on the NetApp so using NetApp backup tools isn’t an option.

vDR Documentation

vDR Download Link

Installation

vDR is pretty flexible with backup destinations – you can choose to back up VMs to a CIFS share, VMDK, or RDM.  As I mentioned before I wanted to have my backups on a 1TB SATA drive that I have connected into my whitebox ESX host.  What I liked about this approach is I can keep my “production” virtual machines on my NetApp FAS270 and the backups on the single 1TB SATA disk.  A few of the benefits of vDR:

• Uses changed block tracking (if the VM hardware is version 7) to only send the changed data blocks to the backup destination
• Ability to expand the storage destination on the fly (up to 2 1TB dedupe volumes per backup appliance)
• Deduplication

My first step was to create a VMFS datastore on the 1TB SATA disk, knowing that you could have up to (2) 1TB dedupe volumes per backup appliance I formatted the datastore with a 4MB block size.

I ran into an issue creating a datastore on the SATA volume, it gave me an error that said “failed to get disk partition information” I found that the drive was using a GUID partition table and needed to resolve that (covered in a separate blog post).

At this point I had the datastore I wanted to use ready, and I had the ISO from VMware downloaded and mounted on my vCenter server (which is a VM).

Then click to install the Data Recovery Client Plug-In

After the install is completed open the vSphere Client and go to Manage Plug-Ins and make sure that VMware Data Recovery is enabled.

Now that the client is installed it’s time to install the vDR backup appliance, from the vSphere Client go to File –> Deploy OVF Template

Select the option to Deploy From File and click Browse

Browse to the VMware Data Recovery CD and go into the VMwareDataRecovery-ovf folder, select the VMwareDataRecovery_OVF10.ovf file and click Open.

Continue through selecting the default options, when you get to the IP Address Allocation screen you will have to leave it at DHCP – you can set a static IP address later through the vDR console after it boots up.

After it is done importing, edit the settings of the virtual machine and add another hard drive.  In my case this VMDK will reside on the backup datastore I created from my 1TB SATA disk.

Power on the vDR virtual machine and after it boots select Configure Network and assign the appropriate network information

Plug-In Configuration

From the vSphere Client select Solutions and Applications –> VMware Data Recovery.  Enter the IP address of the vDR and select Connect. Enter the appropriate username/password when prompted.

Backups

By default it will create Backup Job 1, click Edit on this job.  I needed to format the VMDK I gave the vDR appliance yet, after you format the volume it will automatically mount it as well.

On the next screen you can set your Backup Window times, see the note at the bottom of the post about backups that exceed backup window times.

On the next screen you can define your retention policy.

It automatically kicks off the first backup job, and I can see the backup when I click on the Restore tab

Notes

• The default schedule for backups is Monday through Friday at night, as well as Saturday and Sunday.  vDR will attempt to backup the VM once per day, however if the backup does not complete during it’s backup window the backup will not continue – it will stop and resume during the next backup window.  Something to keep in mind if you are backing up a large amount of virtual machines (the maximum is 100)
• Does not backup templates
• vDR from what I have seen/read is not fully ready for large enterprise deployments.  Judging by some of the posts on the VMware communities site it may not even be ready for smaller deployments but since this is just a home lab I decided to give it a go and get more familiar with it.  I’m expecting to swap it out for something else at some point in the future.
• This is a simple disk to disk based backup, it does not (by default) allow you to do disk to tape, although this document seems to go over the subject.

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