CA just released an important minor update for its great enterprise backup solution: BrightStor ARCserve.
I stated many times that is possible to achieve virtual machines hot backup on Windows Server 2003 host platforms when the backup solution supports the Microsoft Volume Shadow Service technology.
By VSS-snapshoting the physical drive where VMs reside you can have a full backup anytime without downtime. This method isn’t wide used anyway cause VSS-snapshoting VMs is like shutting down them unplugging virtual power cord: at restore time you risk to have a corrupted operating system.
Anyway I found this a reliable enough (and cheap) solution for the non mission critical VMs, working with it since two years.
I choosed CA BrightStor ARCserve 11.0 to achieve this task after one month of intensive lab comparisons with others enteprise backup solutions. I choosed it cause I found it the only really reliable with VSS technology and with all features I was looking for.
Today CA releases ARCserve release 11.5 and introduces official support for VMware and Microsoft virtual machines backup from host OS, as stated in the Release Notes.
There aren’t detailed technical explainations about this so I’ll update this post as soon as I get more documentation. Meanwhile if someone from CA is reading can contact me to provide details.
Update: The documentation included in the 11.5 trial package reports just Microsoft Virtual PC and Virtual Server support as new feature. And there’s no mention about backup support from host OS.
I’ll try to contact CA support staff to have an explaination about this discrepancy.