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Can You Backup & Restore Apple Mac OS X Guests Using vSphere Data Protection (VDP)?

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It is really cool to see more and more customers show interest in running Apple Mac OS X on vSphere. Just the other day there was another interesting question that was raised from a customer asking whether vSphere Data Protection (VDP) would be able to backup and restore Mac OS X guests.  Apparently there is still an assumption that VMware Tools do not exist for Mac OS X guests? Perhaps virtualizing Mac OS X is still relatively new for some folks, but it is just like any other guest operating system that is supported on vSphere.

I think the following two statements should help clarify any confusion that may exist:

  • To virtualize an Apple Mac OS X guest, you need to be running vSphere on Apple hardware. This is due to a requirement in Apple's EULA and is also enforced within the vSphere platform. You can get more details in this article. 
  • VMware Tools does exist for Apple Mac OS X guests, take a look at this article for more details.

Now, if we take a look at VDP's evaluation guide on page 4 we will see the prerequisite for backing up a guest OS is pretty straight forward:

At least one virtual machine running a supported guest operating system (OS) with VMware Tools installed

Since Apple Mac OS X (10.8, 10.7, 10.6 and 10.5) is a supported guest operating system and we have VMware Tools for this operating system, then yes VDP can be used to backup and restore an Apple Mac OS X guest. To demonstrate that this actually works, I have a Mac OS X 10.7 VM running in my home lab (Apple Mac Mini which is not officially supported) and I have deployed the latest version of VDP.

I then setup the backup job for the Mac OS X guests using the super simple VDP backup wizard and then initiate a backup.

Now, let's say I accidentally fat fingered an operation and deleted this VM. Uh oh!? What am I to do? Well don't worry, VDP is there to the rescue!

To restore the VM, it is simply going through the VDP restore wizard and in just a few minutes, I  have now recovered my Mac OS X guest and it is up and running again!

I have said this many times, but it still amazes me on the number of guest operating systems vSphere supports! There really is no workload that vSphere can not virtualize! So if you have any use cases for Mac OS X workloads, rest assure you can safely virtualize it and back it up on vSphere.

Note: Though I showed using VMware VDP as the backup/recovery solution, you should also be able to leverage both VMware vSphere Replication as well as VMware Site Recovery Manager.

number of guest OSes the vSphere platform supports

Configuring vSphere Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) To Manage An Alternate vCenter Server

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When deploying vSphere Infrastructure Navigator (VIN), it is automatically associated with the vCenter Server from which it was deployed from and this behavior is by design. This means if you have two vCenter Servers, you will need to deploy two separate VIN instances, one for each vCenter Server as shown in the diagram below.

For scenarios where you have a separate management and compute cluster, each with their own vCenter Server, it can pose a problem if you want to run all your "infrastructure" virtual machines in the management cluster and not in the compute cluster. This very topic was recently brought up in an internal discussion and after explaining how VIN works, I safely assumed this behavior could not be modified. It turns out the discussion peaked the interest of one of the VIN developers and a suggestion was made on how one could potentially change this behavior. This un-tested (NotSupported) "workaround" would allow a user to deploy a single VIN instance under the management cluster and allow it to associate with another vCenter Server and its workloads. Below is a diagram on what this would look like.

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Charlotte VMUG vOpenData Presentation Posted + New Stats

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Last week I had the privilege to attend the Carolina Users Summit and from what I hear, it is one of the larger VMUGs in the US. I was asked to give a presentation on a recent community project that I collaborated with Ben Thomas on called vOpenData. The presentation goes into some background on the how the project got started, a deeper look at how it works and a live demo including some interesting stats that have not been shared before (CLTVMUG exclusive!).

I would like to thank everyone who attended the session and the great questions that were brought up. For those of you who missed it or could not attend, I have posted the presentation online and you can download it here. I hope everyone enjoyed it and hopefully you will contribute your data as well as help spread the word about vOpenData! Both Ben and I have been quite swamped with work and changes lately, so hopefully we will have some a nice update for everyone real soon!

Even if you know what vOpenData is, I think it is still worthwhile to check out the presentation as it contains a bunch more stats that have never been shared before. Here is a sneak peak of two that I am sure both Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman would be quite proud of:

Clusters w/vSphere HA Configured:

Clusters w/vSphere DRS Configured:

Lastly, I would like to give a big thanks Charlie Gautreaux for inviting me out to the Charlotte VMUG! I had a great time and met a lot of really cool people!