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Avatar of Andrea Chiavegato
Andrea ChiavegatoFlag for Italy

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difference between vmware data recovery and consolidate backup

I have an ESX 4.0 U1 infrastructure VSphere Essential Plus and I would like use the backup tools included in the license. I do not understand the difference between Data Recovery and Consolidate Backup. What is the difference between the two? What is the best? In what situations we use one or the other? Thanks
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Avatar of Paul Solovyovsky
Paul Solovyovsky
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I'll try to explain using layman's term so that you understand better
VDR is a backup appliance, its actually a VM that need to run in your environment to perform backup of other VMs, you dont have to install it but you need to download the prebuilt appliance from vmware, you then install VDR vSphere client plugin, by using this plugin you will have the user interface needed  to manage backup tru the running VDR, not all licensed vSphere can use VDR

VCB is like a set of commands which understand how to talk to esx host/vCenter to backup VMs
There are no special user interface, everything is tru command line, unlike VDR, you need to install it on a running VM or physical host with specific OS like win2k3, to manage multiple backups efficiently we can install integrated module for 3rd party backup software so that you can use the backup software interface to manage VMs backup, all licensed vSphere can use VCB
In addition to what Pauslolov and Ryder have mentioned, I will add these comments.
VDR was created by VMWare to help those sites where one person handles everything. So VDR allows you to backup your VM's fully to a disk based target. At the moment, it supports full backup of a VM on a schedule you set. To save disk space, it uses deduplication technology while making the backups to save space on your disk target. A major shortcoming of VDR as opposed a VCB backup previously was that you could not do file level restores. You can if you use the latest version of the VDR appliance..
Having played with both, I can tell you that VDR has a long way to go, before I will trust to do my backups. Update 1 of the production has helped increased stability (and included the file level restore capability) ... but I will wait until Version 2 of the product comes out before I leave I think I will trust it fully.
For the time being we use a combination of VCB and client backup agents to backup our infrastructure.
One thing I will advise regardless of the solution you choose . Make sure you test your backups regularly i.e. try to restore files, etc to make sure everything is working.