Backing up Virtual machines

[m1ddy]

Hi Guys,

 

I have a couple of VMs running on ESXi 4. The datastore is a local disk but I am not happy just leaving it there.

 

I dont want to have to pay for a full backup solution as we cannot afford it. A regular backup isnt really needed either, just a manual one every couple of days will do as the data doesnt change a lot.

 

I was thinking of connecting an NFS share from an applicance we have but would it just be a case of telling it to move the folder on the datastore to this new datastore running NFS? I am quite happy to do this manually every few days.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

m1d

[plexer]

look into ssh and scp from your esxi box.

[Ashm]

If you go with the NFS share you could use the GhettoVCB script. It works great for us and you'd be able to schedule it as well.

[Hightower]

I'm looking into a similar solution and came across this:

 

Veeam FastSCP 3.0 for VMware ESX / ESXi - VMware file Management.

 

It's free, and you can schedule it to copy folders on the datastore (local disk in my location) to another location.

 

I'm trying it's first run tonight - this works I'll then have our tape backups pluck it from where we copy it to making it D2D2T.

[apaton]

I second Ashm suggestion of GhettoVCB scripts.

[Hightower]

Just trying the ghettoVCB stuff but my ghettoVCB.sh has "^M" characters on the end of every line which is causing problems.

 

Any ideas how to remove?

 

I've search for this and found people saying to enter ":%s/^M//g" (where ^M is Ctrl&M) but as soon as I enter Ctrl&M I get an error saying delimiter missing.

[Ashm]

What did you use to edit the script? Try editing it from esxi console directly. Or use something like Notepad++ and make sure you save it in UNIX format.

[Hightower]

I downloaded the file to my Moodle server, and successfully removed the ^M's in there. I then wget'ed it on to my ESXi from Moodle (as Moodle box is *nix too).

 

Just opened file and this has worked. Must be because ESXi is stripped right down and can't perform this task.

 

Thanks,

[Sandman]

You might like to take a look at esXpress for an "Enterprise" level backup solution similar to VDR 1.0

[diggory]

Also using ghettoVCB to backup VMWare VMs here.

Works very well, even on the full ESX.