So It took a bit too long to get right, but VCB is a powerful tool to get your backups flying along.

Network congestions, poorly configured ports, old servers, all other known enemies of the Backup guys/gals are defeated with the move to Virtual Servers, and the use of VCB backups. 
Our setup is around 40 vm's and the strategy was get the oldest boxes that cant be decommed over to a VM.  Now boxes that would jam up our backup window are leading the pack.  We get speeds regularly around 45,000KB /Second.  This was a game changer in our environment, and with the incrimental backups now available I have no issues at all.   The other nice factor that helps our stats is the lack of partial backups.  It's an all or nothing game, and once you get it right, you have very few failures.  If you do have one its a snap shot jam up most of the time.   This is fixed quickly by logging onto your vmware infrastructure client, and...

Protecting the VMware environment has its own unique set of data protection challenges. There are basically three ways to protect VMware: the guest OS method, the console backup method and the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) method. The guest OS method treats each virtual machine as a standalone server and backups take place as usual as if the virtual is physical server. The second practice is the console backup practice, in which virtualisation administrators back up the VMware ESX Server with no regard of the underlying virtual machines in the ESX environment. (There is a “free” product, ESXi, but it has no console, and requires add-ons to manage.)

VCB Backup requires VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) and initially SAN attached disk (iSCSI or Fibre Chanel) but now supports VMFS with local, JBOD, iSCSI and Fibre-Channel-attached disk, network file system (NFS) and virtual compatibility mode raw device mapping (RDM). The only mode not currently supported is physical...

I saw an analyst report the other day that predicts that in spite of the economic downturn companies, large and small will be spending the same, or even increased, amounts on backup and recovery in fiscal year 2010.

Huh?

To make matters more “huh-like”, this study found that the adoption of disk based technologies is accelerating. Actually, when you think about it this makes sense - disk based backup improves recovery capabilities, backs up virtual environments more effectively and eliminates or reduces the physical requirement (and security hazard) for tape transport.

Actually, it’s making more sense the more you think about it. Older backup solutions or older hardware is less effective, more administratively heavy, time consuming, costing money and effort; new hardware technology on the other hand is more efficient and with new software there is more opportunity to automate more. The automation of IT processes can improve overall IT...

Nowadays, probably not so much. There was a time where a day or two of outage didn’t make a huge difference to businesses - unfortunately that was over 20 years ago. We now live in a “NOW” world where every second counts. Somehow, no matter what your size, you have to consider how to ensure that business-critical data is always protected and always available. How do you improve your Recovery Point Objective? Enter stage left: Symantec Backup Exec Continuous Protection Server.

Continuous Protection Server (CPS) combines Backup Exec data protection with replication technology and disk-based data protection to provide continuous fast and reliable data backup and retrieval. It does what is says on the tin: offering continuous data protection; giving you the ability to restore data at a granular level from points in time throughout the day. At the same time you can perform simultaneous backups of multiple servers; fully integrated with Symantec Backup Exec for...