I need some help to backup up a VM in production environment

[WarlockArg]

Hi,

I depict my scenario in order to see whether someone can help me. I have three ESX servers with the Essentials Bundle licence and of course, one vCenter that comes with that licence. In one of the ESX servers (lets call it "ESX-1") I run a VM that is in production environment. That VM is running as its guest OS Suse Linux and is also running an application that is critical for the business. What I want to do is to backup periodically (suppose each 3 or 4 hours) that VM to another ESX server (for example, ESX-2) in order to prevent a posible failure of ESX-1 hardware or a lost of power in the datacenter (ESX-1 and ESX-2 are in different datacenters but in the same network and same subnet). So, if something happens to ESX-1 I can immediately power on the VM in the ESX-2 server and the only data I lose are the changes between the last backup I had made and the moment of failure.

One important thing is that each ESX server has its own local datastore and I don't have any SAN or shared datastore.

One thing I'm thinking is to use the GhettoVCB script I found in another thread, so I can schedule it in onder to run it for example each 3 hours, but I don't know if it's a good idea.

Another idea is to split the VM virtual disks, so all the guest OS and applications are on one virtual disks and the changing data (database) is on another virtual disk. So I can modify the GhettoVCB script in order to only copy the virtual disk of the database to the other ESX server. Doing so I would speed up the process because I will not be copying each time all the entire VM but only the data that change. Of course the first time I have to make a backup of the entire VM.

That's all. Do you think I can achieve my task in some way?

Thanks.

[AndreTheGiant]

Have a look at:

In your case you can use also

But if your VM is business critical I suggest to consider 3th part backup program (for example Veeam Backup can also do a VM replica).

Andre

[AntonVZhbankov]

Veeam Backup & Replication seems to be perfect solution for you.

FYI Veeam has great discounts for small environments.

---

MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[gfredette]

Look into PHD Virtual backup: http://www.phdvirtual.com

PHD VirtualTM Backup for VMware vSphereTM provides reliable backup and recovery for all of the virtual machines (VMs) in your VMware environment. With PHD Virtual Backup, you can manage backup and recovery right from within vSphere Client using simple, integrated menus. Using the PHD Virtual Backup Console and wizards, you can you create and manage custom backup and restore jobs to meet all of your data protection requirements.

PHD Virtual Backup is built on the next generation of PHD’s award winning VBATM (Virtual Backup Appliance) architecture. Purpose-built for virtualization, the PHD VBA architecture enables backup and recovery to be deployed as a virtualized workload directly on the VMware platform. This approach enables high-performance data protection that seamlessly scales for large and distributed deployments. With PHD Virtual Backup, there is no need to deploy and manage separate physical servers, additional software, scripts, or agents. After you've deployed and configured the PHD Virtual Backup Appliance and plug-in, you're ready to begin protecting your virtual environment, right away.