Backup VDP Data To An External Drive

Well, you have got your new vSphere Data Protection set up and have kicked off a few successful backups. The backup data is stored in your VDP datastore safely and you can restore it any time you want to. Let's say that your VMFS volume hosting your VDP data drives went corrupt, this means that all your precious backed up data is lost. So most of the enterprises look for means to move those backup disk of VDP to an external drive.

Now, there are two ways of achieving this. 

1. Using a script to make a copy of your data disks of VDP to a tape drive or your local machine. The disadvantage of this is that you will have to power off your backup appliance in order for the disks to be copied over. So, if you have one VDP appliance in your environment, your backup is down until the copy completes. 

2. Deploy another VDP appliance and configure replication between the primary and the secondary appliance. The primary is the one that performs your scheduled backups and then replicates this data to the secondary appliance. So, daily backups occur on the primary machine. Replication occurs on the weekends to the secondary appliance. The script runs on the secondary appliance for the rest of the week, as the secondary is not receiving any replication traffic and neither it is running any backup jobs, it can afford a downtime. 

The script:

#Connects to the vCenter Server hosting the backup appliance

Connect-VIServer -Server <vCenter_IP> -User administrator -Password <Password>

#Shuts down the VDP appliance

Shutdown-VMGuest -VM "<VDP_Appliance_Name>" -Confirm:$false

#Sleep time after which the copy script kicks in. Value is in seconds

Start-Sleep -s 600

#Copy script

Copy-DataStoreItem vmstore:\<Data_centername>\<VDP_Datastore_Name>\"<VDP_Appliance_Name> 6.1"\*.vmdk D:\VDP\vdp01 -Force

#Starts the appliance after the copy is done

Start-VM -VM "vSphere Data Protection 6.1" -Confirm:$false

Here, I am copying the VDP vmdk only files to D drive on my local computer. If you want to copy the remaining files, then simply replicate the #Copy script lines and change *.vmdk to the other file extensions (*.vmx, *.nvram etc)

Sample output during the Power Off:

Sample output during the copy:

Once the copy completes, you can verify the contents of the VM in the local drive/tape connected to your machine. 

**Try at your own risk if you are running a production environment. All the tests for the script was done in my lab**