Thanks for the speedy response. I now got a good understanding of how I can set up a solution and the scheduling using a nas device, a windows server or a linux server.
However, I have yet another lame newbie question. Well, sorry, but here it comes.
Setup: 2 HP servers running embedded ESXi and hosting the VMs locally. Both servers have enough capacity on the datastore to host the VMs from the other server.
Question: Would it be possible to add the datastore of the other server in both servers and kind of cross-backup them? VMs from server 1 -> server 2 and VMs from server 2 -> server 1. This would have been done daily scheduled by crontab if possible.
Pros: If a server go down I can power on the VM straight away on the other physical server without having to copy it across the network first (slow due to big VMs). Easy testing of backups since they´re allready on a datastore where they can be booted and tested directly (without network connection for the tested VM).
This would be sufficient backup of the VMs since the most important data form within the VMs are backuped to a tape device anyhow. I am pretty much not allowed ANY investments right now due to the economic state of the company, so network storage or a backup server is kind of hard to get funding for right now. My second option is using an old server with server 2003 OS and USB attached drives. The scheduling through windows seems like the easiest solution for me anyhow. Might use both solutions with a backup weekly to the old server just in case. Transfer to/from the old server would probably be too slow to use it for daily backups.
Unless I get a negative response I will test this setup. I suppose it depends if it´s possible to add the datastore of the opposite server or not. I´ll at least give it a shot.
Thanks for taking the time to write such a money-saving script for the rest of us 
Hi Bolgard.
The name is the thread is slightly misleading as the script has evolved over the past few months to one that runs directly on the ESXi server itself. A new thread should read Free Linux backup script
If you still want to use Windows then the info is there (somewhere). Personally I'd recommend the LInux/ESXi route as it's far more more contained and versatile. You need to first enable SSH on the ESXi server (plenty of guides around), then SCP iawm's script to it and setup your NFS share. It all depends on what technologies you are using, e.g. Windows, Linux and how good/bad your linux is.
I use only Linux where I work, so have a 1TB NFS share that I use for my VM backups, I mount the NFS through the VI client, run the script - nice and simple... Hope that helped a little.....
I think I can manage using Linux. But you answered my questions spot on, what I didn't know was where to run the script and how. Thanks!
EDIT: If I have a virtual disk of size 80 GB, but using only 6 GB, will the backup be 80 GB or 6 GB?
If you've only used 6GB of an 80GB VM and if you've set your backup to export the VM as 'thin' disks (e.g. -2 gb sparse) it will only copy that 6GB to your backup location, much quicker backups, but they do need to be converted back to 'fat' disks if you need to restore etc. Iams script has a setting that you can set for this. Hope this clears this up
I eventually completed a backup using OpenFiler - 22 hours for approximately 500GB of VM's.
My preferred distro is CentOS so I've just wiped OpenFiler and used that. My first problem appeared to be that I couldn't mount the XFS partition created by OpenFiler. I eventually formatted the partition using XFS again and it worked fine.
I also used the async option (thanks kpc) and I'm now getting a huge throughout (maximum 13603kbps according to the VI clientbut it's still pretty low. I was hoping for a lot more in a Gigabit network!
A question about async - aync is obviously faster because of the reduced overhead and can cause corruption. Just a thought but would an MD5 hash check at the end (although it's slow) not confirm the file was fine?
Hi blueivy
I'm guessing sync does a few extra things like resend packets, manage failures etc - just a guess. I've been wanted to read up on it for a while just never enough time All I know is that with async set my backups are about 5 times quicker. If you need some timings to compare post some of yours and i'll post some back.
Cheers
