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Title
vRanger 4.x: VMware Lab Manager Support -
Description
A customer has ESX 4.0, 4.1 and VMware Lab Manager as part of their environment. They have an internal lab they use for training, etc. that is visible in Virtual Center w/Lab Manager. This lab setup is made up of many, seemingly identical Windows VMs. All attempts to backup these machines in vRanger fail (error unspecified).
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Cause
VMware Lab Manager makes use of “Linked Clones” for VM deployment/disk space minimization in a Lab environment. This is NOT SUPPORTED by vRanger. -
Resolution
There is no workaround for supporting linked clones in vRanger currently -
Additional Information
Linked Clones are not full clones of a VM. Instead, Lab Manager allows a single VM to serve as the “master” VM (with the main VM flat-file(s)). In turn, new VMs are deployed from this master VM by taking snapshots of it, then mounting these snapshots as VMs in their own right, without physically copying the main flat files to their own file systems.