Would be interested in this too. Might be some white papers round the corner after release day - maybe.

I have the same question and many others. There are two upcoming webcasts providing details on this technology. Go to https://symantecevents.webex.com/mw0305l/mywebex/d....

The master server can be a backup host.  A master server can be used as the backup host for non-VCB backups using the Vstorage API.  For VCB backups, the backup host is the VCB server.

My Vstorage backups are successful, but my restores are failing with Status 5.  Anyone out there got this working yet?

Attended the recent webcast for NB7 for VMware and found it very helpful.
I would assume my master server now to be the 'backup host' in the backup environment.

restores failing, could be a number of things, but first thing to check is that the user credentials you supplied to netbackup on the vcenter server or ESX host have the privileges to perform restores as well as backups.

If your restores are failing with status 5 it is probably permissions make sure your VCB user account has data center admins rights and try again. I had a few issues with this but once it had full rights all worked ok. It's because the Pre built backup role in vsphere does not have enough permissions for restoring a machine only backing it up.

If you already have a VCB proxy you can use it as your backup host. You can have either a master/media server as the proxy if you wish. It is reccommended that your backup host/VCB proxy is a media server. Also using the vstorage API's is much more stable than VCB!

If you do not have all your machines running on vsphere you will need to keep VCB for those machines. Also if you want to use block level incremental backups your VM's must be upgraded to Virtual hardware version 7.

Hi..
I've participated in NB7 Beta program and I've tested backups and restores with vStorage API.
There were some some issues for example with restore over SAN (problem with performance and restore of thin provisioned disks).
But BLIB backups, single file mapping etc works fine and combination of vstorage backup and integrated deduplication is very good solution. Deduplication of vmware virtual machines is at the level of ~90%.

marekk

Thank you everyone for your feeback.

I'm using a Vsphere user account with the built-in administrator role, which grants all permissions to the user.
I'm able to verify my user credentials through NetBackup and the VMware Vstorage backups are successful.

I'm not using a VCB server, or a Vcenter server and my master/media server is my backup host.

There is a Vsphere firewall setting to allow NetBackup Ports 13724, 13783 , and 13720 through, but I believe this only applies to VCB backups.

I enabled this setting, but still getting the same results.

check Catalogs... if backups are properly there on the specific Media Server... then it will allows you to restore as well.

This is not documented in the NetBackup 7.0 VMware admin guide.  At least I have not seen it documented.

I heard about it listeing to a NetBackup VMware recorded webex session.

The NetBackup VMware guru stated towards the end of the most recently webex session for NetBackup with VMware that the backup host must be a Windows server. 

http://netbackupdemo.com

Previous webcasts can be replayed.  

backup host = media server?

hopefully not master server!

It could be that the Vmware vStorage API's are still only written for Windows only, thus the restriction in NetBackup...    If that is the case, this is a VMware issue and restriction, that Symantec Netbackup has to follow.

I recently built out a Netbackup 7 Environment ; for vmware.

I have to say its been a great change from VCB backups, Im running daily backups of both windows and linux guests without issue. Linux fullvm work great i dont see the quiese timeouts that were present with VCB. Windows Fulls and Incr (Full MappedVM), work perfectly, i get no hangs and all my guests complete backups daily.

In reguards to speed, we see roughly 70-90mb/sec on backup, and 50-70mb/sec for restore(SAN only).

The only isse we did come across was the permissions, Vmware and Symantec originally stated that the permissions required for the vmware credentials were the same as with VCB, we found that to be slighty inaccurate, for Backups the permissions are the same, but with restores you need pretty much an admin user. I say pretty much becuase we still dont have the exact permissions nailed down.

For the original Question, the VCB Proxy is no longer required, and this is whats confusing about the manuals, you need a VMware Backup Host.... Basically its the same thing, you just no longer need the proxy storage for backups. The host has to be windows based, it does not have to be a media server but it is reccommended.

is there any special license needed to backup VMs on NB7?