SAN and Network backup in same job?

[Mercurial]

Hey there,

A quick question: we recently implemented VCB to speed up our backups, however we still have two ESX servers that are not hooked up to the SAN, and are using local storage.

Is it possible to create a job that will utilize SAN-mode for any VMs stored on the SAN, and network-mode for any non-SAN VMs?

[Gostev]

Hello, you will be able to do this with v4 which we are planning to make generally available later this month. It has the new job mode called "SAN with failover" (actually, it is the default setting), which attempts to use the SAN mode first, but if direct connection to shared storage is unavailable for specific VM, it fails over to the Network mode.

Funny coincidence actually, last week someone on beta tried out exact same scenario as you describe, this did not work for all VMs in the job, but we have determined and fixed the issue - so now it is working flawlessly...

[Mercurial]

Great news! Thanks for the response; we're definitely excited about v4!

[Gostev]

No problems. I should have mentioned here that the same logic works fine even when VM has multiple disks, with some disks located on local storage, and other disks - on shared storage. Each VM disk will be processed using the SAN mode whenever possible - or using the Network mode otherwise.