How to backup Citrix XenDesktop vDisks

[SynthosKralupy]

Hello,

do you know any magic how to backup (select) specific virtual disk for backup only?

My situation is Citrix XenDesktop with virtual desktops with personal vDisks attached to them. These PvD are stored on specific dedicated storage, different from VM's OS storage. My goal is to backup PvD disks only.

I have backup job with exclusion to backup only SCSI:2 disks. But it's not very effective, because Veeam backup server is traversing over all VMs in vSphere folder (there is mix of simple VMs without PvD together with these with PvD), creating and removing snapshots for all one by one.

Best solution would be to somehow filter VMs selection by criteria, for example something like "virtual disk on StoragePVD exists".

Is something possible?


Thank you.

Pavel.

[veremin]

Best solution would be to somehow filter VMs selection by criteria, for example something like "virtual disk on StoragePVD exists". Is something possible?

It's not possible with GUI, but should be with the use of PowerCLI. Usage of PowerCLI script would allow you to go over VMs residing in given folder, find ones that have disks located on the said store and add them to backup job.

Also, why not to add disk exclusions on VM rather than on container?

Thanks.

[SynthosKralupy]

These VMs are generated dynamically, its names and count is changing in time.

Thanks for tip with Powershell, I will start study its possibilities.


Regards.

Pavel.

[veremin]

PowerCLI reference guide might be a good place to start. Thanks.

[didi2102]

Hi SynthosKralupy,

I'm looking for the same thing than you.
In fact, i'm trying to study a disaster recovery for XD 7.5.
We use Dedicated VM with PvD for all users.
Did you find a solution with the replication solution offered by veeam ?
Or do you believe that only the PvD backup can offer a restore solution in case of disaster recovery, with the use of the citrix's script backup-migration.ps1 ?

Thanks,

Fred

[veremin]

As far as I can understand, it's just one VM with all users' disks attached to it, right? If so, I'm wondering what issues (from your perspective) might occur during backup or restore, if just select the VM as a source for backup job, and start to backup/restore it? Thanks.

[didi2102]

Thanks for your answer Eremin. In case of disaster recovery, the difficulty is because you create a catalog, with VM inside and Personal vDisk attached to each VM. The catalog points to the originals VM and there is no possibility to give the catalog the new destination....
It gives me a real headache and I have to find a solution with Veeam to make the disaster recovery works !