It seems like VMware has really gone out of their way to make backing up this appliance difficult. I've finally figured it out. Backup the datastore via a read-only NFS mount on another server. However for this to work, the datarecovery service has to be stopped. Even "do not run maintenance" is apparently too much activity. (I tried using a CIFS share but eventually it got so corrupt I couldn't even format it and re-create it. Tech support was useless.)
So I need to cron the shutdown and startup of the datarecovery service. But conveniently enough, cron is not available on VDR 2.0.1. A "yum install crond" finds nothing.
How do I install cron?
Thanks.