lamw,

to clarify I mean without the use of the text file.

Thanks!

pollysulfide

Sincee this is ESXi there is no firewall.

That said I have begun to put the management network on it's own subnet behind a physical firewall. A VPN then connects a management workstation to all the ESXi hosts. It also allows me to use NFS relatively securly.

eugeneb,

It looks like it was not able to start the vmkfstools copy on the source "XP_OA.vmdk" file which is the Virtual Machine that you're trying to backup. Can you check to see if "XP_OA.vmdk" is actually made up of multiple sparse VMDK files? Either "cd" to that directory and look or cat out the "XP_OA.vmdk", this is the descriptor file and should show you if it's a full or 2GB sparse files.

Also which mode are using to backup (full or 2gb sparse)? Are you just testing this with one Virtual Machine? There is a "DEVEL_MODE" flag that the top which you can set to "1" and this will just print out the information about your Virtual Machine and not run any type of backups, this just validates that the information it's pulling from the host is correct. Secondly, I would check the NFS datastore, make sure you can write to it and there are no issues.

Update: With some testing, I've found you can go from sparse->full or sparse->sparse without any issues. Are your VMDK's stored in the same datastore as your VM, technically that should not matter since it should provide the full path of the VMDK when it tries to copy. I would probably suggest manually running a vmkfstools copy on this VM and see if you can get it to work. Also if you can provide us with the listings of that directory and cat out the VMDK descriptor file, that may also shed some light.

You don't make it clear but have you exchanged the public keys between the ESXi boxes? Your authorized_keys files should end up with two keys. One from the scripting server and one from the oposite ESXi host. SCP the .pub file and cat id_rsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys. You will also need to make sure that you specify the private key file to use ( scp -i /.ssh/id_rsa )

Be aware that the .ssh folder will go away if the ESXi host is restarted. The simplest way to restore is to make a copy to your datastore and restore it as part of the startup. Add a line to rc.local.

You need to explicity specify the private key to us. scp -i .ssh/id_rsa

Have a look at trilead infrastructure explorer, www.trilead.com it has some interesting features... Including ESXi backup support FREE and cloning with the purchase of a licence,, However I have found that if you backup a VM you can resotre it anyware ad it isa clone...

Thanks and I hope this helps someone.

Looks like there are some limitation with the free solution:

Tasks	Free Edition	Licensed Edition
Task Scheduler	No	Yes
Backup from ESX 3i to ESX (SAN or local storage), Linux or FreeBSD	No	Yes
Backup from ESX 3i to VMX management station	Yes	Yes

I think folks here are looking for an easy/free solution that allows you to schedule set of backups for either ESX w/SC or ESXi and allowing the backups to go on any storage medium. Looks like Bullet #1 squashes scheduling, and bullet #2 confuses me because it does not say anything about straight ESXi Virtual Machine backups, it just mentions to an ESX (SAN or local storage)??? Are you saying something like what xtravirt has on their XVS ?? Sounds fishy, may not be all that complete/free for what user's are looking for.

Also Bullet #3 says you can backup ESXi Virtual machines to the VMX managment station, so it sounds like you can but it has to go to that utility/system.

If you would like to clarify these points since you may have used it that would be great for the folks that may look at a GUI solution.

In answer to Dave and Lawm

I have looked at what is disabled and what is not however the scheduler does not work ok on the free version and I only have NAS 2 TB and drives in my white box 2 TB that I am using right at his time I have backed up 9 machines and however only get about 5 to 7 MBs transfer .

It is not the quickest. but it does do the job.

I dont know about the san or vmx managment station I have neither. Nas and or a share to the windows client work fine.. I have all gig network.

Ahhh I can think of nothing else right now.. let me know if this is good for you and ill be back in about 1.5 hours to see whats new...

Have a great day.

Oh yes it does the backups hot or cold.