I don’t know why, but today I found myself looking through the VCB 1.5 Release Notes and came across this in the New Features section:

Windows Server 2008 Proxy Support (Experimental)
Consolidated Backup offers experimental support of Windows Server 2008 on a physical or virtual proxy.

Why is this significant? I ran across another blog today describing some of the new Storage changes/benefits of Windows Server 2008 and #4 was:

4. “Windows finally has the option to leave new LUNs alone instead of trying to mount them. This was one of those things that gave Windows a rep as a bad neighbor in SAN environments.”

A Windows Server 2003 machine will attempt to automatically assign drive letters to each new LUN it detects. This feature must be disabled before connecting the VCB proxy to any SAN LUNs or VMFS data corruption could occur. The commands below are used to disable the automatic drive letter assignment capabilities of Windows 2003:

diskpart
automount disable
automount scrub

However, if #4 above is correct, Windows Server 2008 disables automount and thus, may be a better choice for the VCB Proxy server. I have not yet had the opportunity to test this configuration and was curious if anyone out there has…..