Guest VM Backup from ESXi 3.5 to ESXi 4.1

[Pixxxx]

Dear all,

I'm planning to design a different solution for my vmware environment but until it will be redesigned I need to have a poor men disaster recovery solution for safety reason of course, so I'm ask to the community which is the best way to have a backup of my running environment

the scenario is the following:

1. Active host using ESXi 3.5.0 OS

     -different guest VM hosting Windows 2003 , Windows 2008, Exchange 2010, Exchange 2003, CentOS, AD etc..

2. Slave host using ESXi 4.1.0 OS

     -this host is empty but configured in order to be able to start a copy of the virtual machine previously mentioned

I'm planning to stop all VM machines running on the host nr.1 in order to make a cold copy useing "Veem Backup and FastSCP" tool, so, I will be able to start machines in case of an hardware failure of the host number one, these copies will be also usefull as backup for restoring VM on the host nr.1

so the questions are:

1. is it possible in this scenario execute cold copy of the guest VM?

          we are talking about ten machines with utilization in terms of storage of 1,6 TB of data

2. ESXi 4.1 will be able to start guest machine created and currently running under an a ESXi 3.5 host?

3. Veem Backup is the right way to proceed considering that I'm trying to achieve the goal using free tools?

Thanks to all

[AndreTheGiant]

1. Yes

2. Yes

3. Could be a solution.

Andre

[DSTAVERT]

is it possible in this scenario execute cold copy of the guest VM?

          we are talking about ten machines with utilization in terms of storage of 1,6 TB of data

1.6 TB is a sizeable chunk of data. It will take a long time to copy that much data across the network. For some of your data you might want to look for additional solutions. For large file servers you can consider using things like DFS replication (part of Windows server) to another running VM on the second ESXi host. Copy the OS portion of the VM but use DFS for the files.

[Pixxxx]

approximately, how much time will take the copy?
thanks

[Pixxxx]

considering that using network I have a transfer rate of 1MB/s, the copy process will take around 16 days, so, I'm trying the following solution:

1. shutdown guest VM

2. copy them on SCSI external disk, with SCSI2 protocol the copy process should take around 12 hours

3. copy from SCSI external disk to the new host

I think that is the best solution

which is your opinion?

Thanks

[Pixxxx]

I have solved the issue starting the copy directly from a Virtual Machine that is running on the VMWare host, now I have a transfer rate of 50MB/s

Thanks to all

[GlenS]

Hello Pixxxx

Another quick note... once you've moved your VM's to the new host it might be worth updating the VM's Hardware Versions

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsp40u1_i/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm#href=admin/c_virtual_machine_hard...

Regards

Glen