offsite backup?

[glenndm]

Hi,

I'm currently using the esxi 5 free edition on a mac mini.

This little device has replaced a hulking big and noisy server with significantl increased performance.

So I'm very .

Only the backup side is causing me anxiety. I'm considering buying the full esxi license if only to allow for VM backup possibilities.

At the moment, the only possibility I found, is stopping a VM and exporting it to an OVF Template - which is manual and takes too long.

But, on the other hand, all the backups method I found for the commercial license, do not seem to leave the Esxi datastore, storing their backupsets on a vmfs datastore. This locks that backupset again to the esxi computer.

I strive to have daily onsite and offsite backupsets  - stored on onsite disks; online backup and removable disks. Those last are rotated offsite on a daily basis.

Should the esxi computer be lost (fire,theft, meteorstrike ), I'm sure to have recent restore possibilties.

What (semi)automatic methods exist to take VM backups that allow for removable disks?

regards

glenn

[vmroyale]

Note: Discussion successfully moved from VMware ESXi 5 to Backup & Recovery

Without the vStorage APIs for Data Protection available in a licensed edition, you will be looking at a scripted or other manual solutions. With those APIs, you could use any number (some even free) backup solutions that would allow you to save the backups to varying locations.

[LennieDH]

You could have a look at Ghetto VCB scripts which allow to perform backups with free ESXi version.

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

Regards,

Paolo

[glenndm]

Thanks for the replies and the link to the scripts.

Those should be sufficient.

glenn

[jeremyb]

Glenn,

Also take a look at Thinware vBackup (www.vbackup.com). It allows you to schedule backups of virtual machines running on ESXi free.

[DataJunkie]

The most value priced automatic method for VM backups that I know of is from Zetta.net. The performance is very fast in our environment and gives me the "no-touch" daily VM backups I was looking for.

[VMSpotlight]

You should take a look at PHD Virtual as option to back up to any in or offsite target.

PHD's upcoming CloudHook release also allows you to send offsite backups to the cloud as an easier option conpared to managing removable media because you can just schedule it and let it run from there. You can also recover directly from it as well.

I would however point out that if you want to backup to the cloud you will need to be prepared to have the backup process use a fair chunk of bandwidth during run time. So that will need to be taken into consideration!

If you want to know more feel free to DM me!