ESXi Backup Solution

Ive been looking into using ESXi so am looking at backup solutions. As ESXi has a very limited number of tools installed in the host OS you are very limited to your backup options.

I have came back with this thread on the vmware forums which seems ideal. I am in the process of testing atm (so far so good) and intent on doing a howto if all goes well so will post back in the future, but for now here it is

VMware Communities: Free ESXi Backup Solution for Windows ...

The first post gives you one option but imo its not great. Post 2 is what im interested in, and further down an expansion on post 2 adding compression

Did you get this working?

Does anyone else have a good simple backup solution for VMWare ESXi 4?

I'm setting up a server for virtualisation. I could just put Windows Server and VMWare Server on it, but at a greater performance cost.

Free backups with ESXi4 (free) have been discontinued by most vendors under request by VMware. Which is why the backup vendors are a little quiet.

Things That Make You Go Hmmmm - Veeam Backup Not Using Preferred Free ESXi APIs? | VM /ETC

So its possible to still use the APIs and its possible for people to make their own, check out ghettoVCB which can be found here: VMware Communities: ghettoVCB.sh - Free alternative for backing up VM's for ESX(i) 3.5 and 4.0+

I used GhettoVCB in ESXi3.5 but we've gone for paid for ESX4 and I don't have any ESXi4 boxes i can test this with. There is a HIT with the Ghettoscripts, the VMware kernel has to do all the work so CPU0 will be heavily used while performing these scripts. You may want to give the VMware Kernel more memory, this has to be decided on install tho.



Some of these backup solutions are actually more expensive than ESX4.

Yup. Most have been discontinued.

Although if you are running ESX as well as ESXi I guess you could vMotion across and backup on ESX and then move back to ESXi.

esXpress definitly has the capability to do this.