I'm rather new to the world of VMs. I have been researching backup solutions for VMs for the last few days. I have found suggestions to perform backups by:
- Export to an OVF template
Not really a backup per se but a way of preserving the virtual machine. Note that not all metadata can be preserved in this fashion and so exporting to an OVF isn't really considered a backup.
- Browse the DataStore and Download/Upload the files back to other inventories.
Definitely not a good way to backup a VM for a variety of reasons.
My question is: If I have a number of different Virtual Machines with each one having about 2 snapshots each, is it somehow possible to create a backup of the entire VM and also have the Snapshots backed up as well so that if I restored the VM on a different host the VM would work as before and the Snapshot Manager would still show the snapshots? I searched forums for a while and couldn't find any valuable information.
There are ways to work around this, but they're not really official methods built into backing up a virtual machine. Unless you have a very specific use case (i.e., not just general VM activity), this probably isn't something you should be doing. Running VMs on multiple snapshots is not a recommended thing to do for long periods of time.
Most backup tools will take a consolidated view of the VM from that point, effectively collapsing all snapshots down into the state the backup application captures. When restored, there will be no snapshots present on the machine.
