I am looking to do backups of vAppTemplate from within vCloud Director. I have been waiting for this feature to show up natively for some time now. I am not sure why this is not there yet. Anyone know? Is it a limitation of vCloud Director or is it just not enough business justification from Veeam? Please share if you know
I've seen there are some solutions on this forum from someone, where they backup the vcenter VM's that belongs to the vAppTemplate. Sadly, this method does not include all the vApp metadata which I find very important for a full restore case.
My thought was to do a backup using a similar method from the above mentioned solution, with powershell.
The idea is as follows;
* Keep a database of vAppTemplates and their current version number.
* For each vAppTemplate in this database, create a regular vApp and add it to a backup job or create a new backup job and execute it.
* If in the future the version number of a vAppTemplate increases, then a new backup needs to be initiated of that template.
Now to the problem:
I am using linked clones.
When creating a vApp out of a template and immediately start the backup job, you can see that it queries the vApp VM correctly; "Total size: 100,0 GB (24,2 GB used)" .
However, backup is finished very quickly and when looking at the backup files, you notice that the .vbk is only 30MB big.
It seems that all it does here is to backup the vApp VM's delta file but not the parent(s) in the linked clone chain.
When trying to restore this vApp, it automatically suggests that it shall be restore and chained together with the template it came from. That works.
But when deleting the template and trying a restore, the VM obviously fail to boot as the parent disk is gone.
How do I make B&R backup VM's that are linked clones as they where full clone VMs?