Hi Folks
I have set up an ESXi 4 box on a Dell PowerEdge 2950. The system performs well and all hardware is recognized. I have attached NFS and iSCSI datastores and would like to perfom automatic backups (using a cron job) from my datastore1 (internal RAID array) to one of the datastores (most likely iSCSI).
I would like to use ghettoVCB4i.sh which I have stored on my iSCSI datastore (e.g. /vmfs/volumes/vmiscsi/tools/ghettoVCB4i.sh)
I would like to use the internal crontab of ESXi /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root for scheduling the script (not an external Linux, Windows box using plink.exe or ssh to trigger it) . Is it possible or not ?
*0 2 * * 6 /vmfs/volumes/vmiscsi/tools/ghettoVCB4i.sh*
Unfortunately ESXi doesn't store crontab persistently. So my questions are:
Which directories on ESXi are persistent and which ones are volatile ?
/ (volatile or non-volatile) ?
/var (volatile or non-volatile) ?
/opt (volatile or non-volatile) ?
/bootbank (volatile or non-volatile) ?
Is there any other way to inject files into an installed ESXi system (not patching CD or USB Stick) ?
/bootbank/oem.tar ? Does it still exist on ESXi 4 ?
What about /local.tgz ? When I look at the log file /var/log/sysboot.log I can see the following command executed ner the beginning: tar xzf /local.tgz -C /
Can I chnage or ad files to local.tgz ? Are they persistent ?
Does there exist a non-volatile startup script (such as in linux /etc/rc.local) which is called upon startup where I could put
a command such as
*echo "0 2 * * 6 /vmfs/volumes/vmiscsi/tools/ghettoVCB4i.sh" > /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root*
or call another script stored on my datastores ?
I mean is there any way to persistently hook into ESXi's startup procedure without using external commands ?
Regards,
Oliver
