Bacup of ESXI without snapshots

[greenhorn1]

We are currently running both VM Server and ESXi. We have a backup solution for the server side. We shut down the server via vm-cmd script and pull the servers to tape. I would like to do the same with ESXi but everything I read is using snapshots. Our Backup software is Symantec Backup Exec 12. Does ESXi use the same vm-cmd to shut down the servers? If so how would I invoke this script in ESXi? We do have the storage space but do not want to impact our production enviormnent by using up so much bandwidth and time to move the copy of our VM's Some of our VM's are 2 and 3 hundred gig and that takes too much time when I can move them straight to tape one less step. HELP PLEASE.

[guyrleech]

If you install the Remote CLI, you can use vmware-cmd to shutdown a VM but I'm not sure how you would then backup a local datastore direct to tape on the ESXi box itself. If you search for "backup" in this forum, you will find quite a few ideas!

[greenhorn1]

I have installed CLI on a test server and have no issues running some of the commands. But I am still not getting how to shut down a server with the vmware-cmd command. Will I have to create a script and place it in the root directory of the ESXI server to do a copy to another location to backup the servers? If so what would be the best practice to do so? Any help would be appreciated.

[TiagoAviz]

Greenhorn,

Well, in ESXi you must use vim-cmd to shutdown the VM's

The fastest backup way in ESXi appears to be to copy the VM's using vmkfstools out to a NFS share mounted thru VI Client. Other people on the forum already have used iSCSI also, which appears to be fast but I've neved tried. Then, after you copy the VM's into the NFS share, you could copy them to tape.

SCP copies as far as I tried, can't go past 3MB/s so it won't help you out.

Does Symantec Backup Exec have an agent that can be installed on ESXi?

[lamw]

This might help: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8760

Correct, using vmkfstools the copy will be more efficient and it's tool provided by VMware to to specifically address moving/copying Virtual Machine disk files on VMFS Volumes, and it should always be used for these type of tasks.

As TiagoAviz has stated, currently if you want to shutdown or for that matter any set of tasks to be executed against a Virtual Machine you have a few options: enable SSH Console (unsupported by VMware) and run "vim-cmd" or install VMware RCLI and remotely power down the VM OR you can download the virtual appliance VIMA which is a consolidated RHEL VM that has RCLI + VI Perl Toolkit and other tools that you can use as a lunching point to manage your ESX Host + Virtual Machines.

Most user's have been using either iSCSI or NFS volume to run backup of Virtual Machines if you're looking for a free solution that can help backup live Virtual Machines and without having to use much Host resources, then the above solution maybe something you might be interested in. There is a way to use "vim-cmd" to mount a NAS Datastore so that you can run vmkfstools to backup your Virtual Machines without the 2gb sparse issue, again the caveat as stated on the document is that it does use some host resources. So for a small setup then it would not be too bad and at any given moment it's only backing up 1 VM at a time.

[greenhorn1]

I have setup a NAS for the NSF share and am woring to get this working. Thank you for the advise and I am chugging forward. I will keep everyone posted.

Symantec does not support ESXi at this time.

[greenhorn1]

Lamw,

I am going to try this script in a test environment.