I’ve been looking for several backup solutions for VMWare lately, which is quite a depressing task, imho.
Being a proprietary tool, VMWare has a problem in common with Windows: it’s full off proprietary API’s you have to go through to be able to pull a backup. Also, whilst VMWare (ESX, but in practice also ESXi) has a unix/Linux like management environment, you don’t get all the tools you’d want to do your thing. Rsync to name one.
Of course, I you walk the line, buy sufficient licenses and extra software, you get to use VCB and can interconnect with “Supported” software like Symantec Backup Exec and the like.
But here and know, all I wanted, next to regular backups, was being able to easily pull backups to a Linux backup server (just a host with plent of disk space, and all the standard software I wanted.) Now, I found it hard to find the right solution to do that. Lots of custom scripts, but nothing that quickly worked. Often ugly scripts or hacks.
So far, the best solution i sticked to is the GhettoVCB script. Add a an NFS export from the Linux backup server to VMWare as a Datastore, and after a simple config, just run the script.
Downside of this approach, when used for a full ESX with SAN environment, is that you have to run in on the virtual host machines themselves, you can’t grab it over a separate VCB host which can haz its own SAN connection.
It works, but I still feel it’s awkward, not sure why. Anybody other suggestions for plain and simple backup tools for vmware?
