HotAdd from a VBR placed on a ESX outside the ESXi cluster

[casaubon]

Hello,

i am working on a VBR 6 design architecture. The goal is to backup VMs hosted in a ESXi 4.1 Cluster. This ESXi Cluster use FC IBM Storage (DS Series).

I would like to install the VBR6 server in a VM outside this cluster on a ESXi 4.1 stand-alone with vSphere Enterprise license. This ESXi stand-alone has an attachement to the fabric with its propers HBA and can access all the VMFS datastore of the ESXi cluster placed on the DS storage. This ESXi has 8 cores and will be dedicated to the VBR6 VM (SQL Express, enterprise manager, backup proxy and backup repository) and the vCenter Server VM.

So, The idea is to use the 'virtual appliance' mode with hotadd in my VBR6 server and to place the backups files in the ESXi standalone local disk through a RDM volume.

Is it possible to do that ? Does the VDDK/HotAdd functionnality permit to mount a vmdk from a VM inside my cluster to my VBR6 VM on a standalone ESXi outside the cluster ?

Thx for your help !

[foggy]

Hello! The main requirement for hotadd is that the host running backup proxy server VM must have all datastores where protected VMs' disks reside connected to it. If your backup proxy has access to the cluster datastore, then hotadd is most likely possible (find some other limitations of using this mode in this KB article). Thanks.

[casaubon]

Thanks you foggy !

My standlone ESXi running the backup proxy server VM have an access to all datastores where is residing the protected VM of my VMware Cluster.

I asked this question because i heard some limitation about the VDDK API for hotadding VMDK belonging to VM in a cluster to a VBR Virtual Appliance outside this cluster...

thanks

[tsightler]

Probably because, in most setups, the cluster is the boundary for shared datastores, i.e. a cluster is generally defined as a group of hosts which share the same datastores. However, technically this doesn't have to be the case.