Snapshots for Fault Tolerant VMs

[Bramha]

The VSphere availability guide says that you cannot Snapshot fault tolerant VMs . How else would one backup such VMs ?

[mlubinski]

snapshot from storage system, or within guest OS

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[TobiasKracht]

Throuhght VM`s backup software; if you are using SAN/NAS - make snapshot of target device, or Veeam Backup. Or make new LUN (again, if you use NFS or SAN), import it to VM and make backups on this disk.

StarWind Software R&D

[AndreTheGiant · Accepted solution]

If you need snap to do backup, you can stop FT, make the snap, make the backup, remove the snap and reactivate FT.

You cannot directly schedule (in task section), but there are some useful scripts that can enable/disable FT from CLI.

Andre

[Bramha]

Andre,Thanks for the suggestion. I am trying it out and found that Snapshots are not allowed even after I disabled FT using using the Webservice API disableSecondaryVM (Its the same thats used in the scripts here http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10279 .

It is allowed after I "Turned off FT" using TurnOffFaultToleranceForVM_Task . However I did not see any API to turn it back on again once I have taken the snapshot. Any idea how I can turn it back on again.

thanks,

Parag

[AndreTheGiant]

Seems that you must remove FT to enable snapshot.

If you simply disable it, snap does not working.

Maybe in next version FT...

Andre

[lamw]

Please take a look at ftCLI script, if you've turned off FT all together, then you need to use create and then enable operation. The API calls are CreateSecondaryVM_Task() and EnableSecondaryVM_Task() which can be seen by looking at the script source.

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009

VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

VMware Developer Comuunity

Twitter: @lamw

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