About reducing the size of VMware backups

Article:HOWTO70911

Created: 2012-02-08

Updated: 2012-02-08

Article URL http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO70911

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About reducing the size of VMware backups

This topic applies to policy configuration for NetBackup for VMware.

NetBackup provides the following options for reducing the backup size for a VMware virtual machine:

Block level incremental backup (BLIB)

BLIB reduces the size of backups (full and incremental) by tracking block-level changes. Only the blocks that have changed since the last full or incremental are included in the backup. For incremental backups, this option applies to cumulative and to differential backups.

BLIB works with VMware's Changed Block Tracking in vSphere to track block-level changes in the virtual machine.

To enable BLIB, click Enable block-level incremental backup in the NetBackup policy VMware tab. NetBackup uses BLIB for storage optimization when the backup runs.

Note:

The first backup you run with BLIB must be a full backup.

See Block-level backup (BLIB): full vs incremental.

Note the following about block level incremental backups:

Works only with ESX 4.0 or later virtual machines at version vmx-07 or later.
Requires vStorage (cannot be used in VCB-based backups).

Note:

If you have used the vSphere Client interface to manually create a snapshot of the virtual machine and that snapshot is currently active, you may have to delete the snapshot.

See Deleting a vSphere Client snapshot.

See Using VMware's Changed Block Tracking for full backups only.

Exclusion of deleted blocks.

Reduces the size of virtual machine backups by excluding any deleted sectors in the file system on the virtual machine.

To enable this option, click Exclude deleted blocks on the policy VMware tab.

Refer to Exclude deleted blocks in the following topic:

See Optimizations options (VMware).