Well - for me, it is OFFICIAL. I am not going to run the VDR until I hear that it is running without any problems. After much effort, I am throwing the towel in the ring. Maybe the next release will be more impressive - and actually work reliably. Even though I have heard VMware say they have customers running it without problems - I JUST DON'T BELIEVE IT.
But - to anyone that is interested, here is a script that is set to run as a cron job on each of the ESX hosts in farm. I have to balance the times that they run - but, at least they running SUCCESSFULLY. I only have 6 ESX servers, so the overhead with managing when each host begins their backup is NOTHING compared to the overhead of trying to get VDR to work.
It isn't elegant - there isn't any notification if there is a failure - BUT HEY...NEITHER DOES VDR!
This is as simple as it can get. I have seen other elaborate backup scripts...but (for me) they are overkill. I have this set to save 3 copies - but you can modify it (just read through the code). The only thing you shoud really have to change, is the backup path. I am using my VDR datastore (/vmfs/volumes/ESXDataRecStore)...just change this to your backup destination path.
Good luck to everyone! We'll meet again when the next version of VDR is released!
This is the script below:
This script will enumerate the guests running on this
host, snap it, clone it, and remove the snaps
This script will also keep 3 versions of the backups
for VMXFILE in $(/usr/bin/vmware-cmd -l)
do
FLDRNAME=`dirname $VMXFILE`;
VMXCFG=`basename $VMXFILE`;
GUESTNAME=`basename $VMXFILE .vmx`
BKUPDIR=/vmfs/volumes/ESXDataRecStore/$GUESTNAME
http:// -d $BKUPDIR.1 || ( mkdir $BKUPDIR.1 && touch $BKUPDIR.1/emptydir.txt; )
http:// -d $BKUPDIR.2 || ( mkdir $BKUPDIR.2 && touch $BKUPDIR.2/emptydir.txt; )
http:// -d $BKUPDIR.3 || ( mkdir $BKUPDIR.3 && touch $BKUPDIR.2/emptydir.txt; )
rm -f $BKUPDIR.3/*
mv $BKUPDIR.2/* $BKUPDIR.3/
mv $BKUPDIR.1/* $BKUPDIR.2/
cp $VMXFILE $BKUPDIR.1
/usr/bin/vmware-cmd $VMXFILE createsnapshot BackupSnap BackupSnap 1 0;
for VMDKFILE in $(find $FLDRNAME -type f -name "$GUESTNAME.vmdk")
do
VMDKFILENAME=`basename $VMDKFILE`
/usr/sbin/vmkfstools -i $VMDKFILE -d thin $BKUPDIR.1/$VMDKFILENAME
done
for VMDKFILE in $(find $FLDRNAME -type f -name "$GUESTNAME"_"?.vmdk")
do
VMDKFILENAME=`basename $VMDKFILE`
/usr/sbin/vmkfstools -i $VMDKFILE -d thin $BKUPDIR.1/$VMDKFILENAME
done
/usr/bin/vmware-cmd $VMXFILE removesnapshots
done
