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stighy
Asked: 2011-11-18 07:05:17 +0800 CST

How to setup a daily backup virtual machine running on VMWare?

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My company has a VMWare server. We run 6-8 virtual machine. I would like to perform daily backup them in a storage server.

How to do this with VMWare? Is there some "component" I don't know ? Or simply, I need to 'physical' copy vmdk files with a simple Bash script ?

backup vmware-server

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It's not a simple bash script by any stretch of the imagination but I've used this excellent script written by Iamw before and it's worked like a charm. We had a 2GB Netgear NAS attached to the network and added as an NFS Datastore:

    http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8760

    This script performs backups of virtual machines residing on ESX(i) 3.5/4.x+/5.x servers using methodology similar to VMware's VCB tool. The script takes snapshots of live running virtual machines, backs up the master VMDK(s) and then upon completion, deletes the snapshot until the next backup. The only caveat is that it utilizes resources available to the Service Console of the ESX server or Busybox Console (Tech Support Mode) of the ESXi server running the backups as opposed to following the traditional method of offloading virtual machine backups through a VCB proxy.

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  2. You can use a variety of software, provided by VMWare to do this. One of them best (IMO) is VMWare Consolidated Backup, altough it can only do file-level backup from Windows-machines. You can schedule it to run every x time.

    Read more about it here (Page 30). It's for ESX(i) 3, but it hasn't changed all that much.

    I, personally, don't backup virtual machines.

    Don't get attached to them. When they fail, throw them away and build a new one. Make sure you have procedures in place that allow you to quickly set up a new VM and put the most recent backup of your data back. A great way to do this is to provision them. You can read all about it here (Page 17).

    If you do backups, backup what matters. Backup the raw data. Files, Databases, ...

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  3. I just wrote simple backup script in python, check it out http://blog.erben.sk/2014/05/30/vmware-backup-script/

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  4. We have developed a totally self contained solution, which has a minimum footprint on the ESXi hypervisor. We offer a totally free and fully functional version that will allow you to backup an unlimited number of VMs and ESXi hosts, it basically has no restrictions.

    It is capable of performing hot backups, both to another datastore and differential over IP to another ESXi host or Linux box by means of Rsync. It is cron programmable. Any Linux user can configure it in a couple of minutes.

    You can download here: https://33hops.com/xsibackup-copia-de-seguridad-vmware-esxi.html

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