Can vDR be used for saving VMs to a removable drive

[stanj]

Give the following:

vSphere 4.1

vCenter Server running Windows 2008 64-bit on a x86 Server (not a VM)

6 ESXi Servers connected to a Dell Storage Vault SAN.

Total of about 65 VMs across the ESXi Servers.

License is Standard version.

Given the above, four of the ESXi Servers are to be removed and sent off site.

I need to save all of the VMs off to a removable HDD for CM.

Can VMware Data Recovery be used to backup the VMs to a shared folder on a remote drive?

Can they then be restored at a later time, including the ones that will need to be restored to 4 new ESXi servers?

If vDR is not an option, any other ideas?

Thanks

[Ward8124]

I think this might work?

If the hard disk is USB and pass through is enabled and working, present the HDD to a VM and create a network share on the HDD. Point this to your VDR as a backup repository. Backup VMs to it and then remove it and then at the other site configure pass through to a VM and rescan the disk. Recreate the share and point a local VDR to this repository and it should see the restores.

EDIT- Performance might be an issue here btw.

[iainh667]

vDR can backup to a CIFS share, which could easily be a removable HDD. 

You could quite easily attach a removable disk to your physical vCenter server, share it out and connect from the vDR appliance.  When you setup a backup job, remember to set a retention policy long enough (e.g. yearly) so that your backups don't get wiped.

Performance shouldn't be too bad if you use eSATA or USB3.

[stanj]

I am wondering what will happen if I back up the VMs to the share, then remove the ESXi Servers from vCenter.

At some point, add new ESXi Servers back into the mix and then attempt to recover th VMs?

[DSTAVERT]

vDR is probably not the most appropriate method. It tends to be somewhat slow to recover. I would look at adding an NFS storage device as a datastore and use vCenter to clone the VMs to the NFS datastore. The cloned VMs can be added to inventory and run directly from the NFS device and or cloned to new ESXi hosts.

[stanj]

ok,

Can you provide a link or a document on how to establish a shared folder on NFS as a datastore in vCenter?

thanks

[DSTAVERT]

Create an NFS-Based Datastore

You can use the Add Storage wizard to mount an NFS volume and use it as if it were a VMFS datastore.

Prerequisites Because NFS requires network connectivity to access data stored on remote servers, before configuring NFS, you must first configure VMkernel networking.

Procedure

1. Log in to the vSphere Client and select the host from the Inventory panel.
2. Click the Configuration tab and click Storage in the Hardware panel.
3. Click Datastores and click Add Storage.
4. Select Network File System as the storage type and click Next.
5. Enter the server name, the mount point folder name, and the datastore name.
   • Note When you mount the same NFS volume on different hosts, make sure that the server and folder names are identical across the hosts. If the names do not match exactly, for example, if you enter share as the folder name on one host and /share on the other, the hosts see the same NFS volume as two different datastores. This might result in a failure of such features as vMotion.
6.    (Optional) Select Mount NFS read only if the volume is exported as read only by the NFS server.
7. Click Next.
8. In the Network File System Summary page, review the configuration options and click Finish.

[stanj]

I have a drive on our vCenter server that is 10 TB.

I created a folder on the drive and shared it and added my username as full control.

I can see the folder on the network as:

\\Idea-chimera\DFSvmBackups\VMs

When adding the share as storage in vCenter under NFS, I enter:

server:  idea-chimera

folder :  /DFSvmBackups/VMs

DataStore Name:  NFSDataStore

I get the following error:

Call "HostDatastoreSystem.CreateNasDatastore" for object "datastoreSystem-310" on vCenter Server "idea-chimera.dom1.jhuapl.edu" failed.

Operation failed, diagnostics report: Unable to complete Sysinfo operation.  Please see the VMkernel log file for more details.

Operation failed, diagnostics report: Unable to complete Sysinfo operation.  Please see the VMkernel log file for more details.