vizioncore have announced vRanger Pro 3.2, their backup/restore solution for VI3. vRanger Pro was previously called esxRanger Professional. There are several new features such as:
- VSS integration
- P2V D/R
- Enhanced write speeds
- Restore to separate datastores
- NoZip Restores
You can find more information about these features here.
The VSS integration interests me the most because it provides a better way to quiesce the Windows file system with support for database applications like SQL Server and Exchange Server.
Until now, you had the VMware Sync Driver to help you with quiescing the file system. When you perform a VCB backup, the sync driver is triggered and tries to flush writes to the file system. This driver is too generic and that has its impact on some applications. The standard way to deal with this was to disable the sync driver or to implement a pre-freeze or post-thaw script.
With VSS integration these issues will go away because applications that implement a VSS writer can be asked to prepare their data for a snapshot. Each application does that in its own specific way (e.g. flush transactions to disk, etc...) After the application has prepared its data, the system is frozen and the VMware snapshot can be taken.
Microsoft already provides VSS support for Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and DPM 2007 (Data Protection Manager) can be used to leverage this support backup a running virtual machine in a consistent state. Naturally, Windows Server Virtualization (Viridian) also supports this. So it is great to see that this is now also available for VMware environments.
