Easy online VM guest backup option?

[Lancegaydon1]

Is there a quick and easy way to do live online backups of an entire guest VM running on ESX4. Something like using vmware converter perhaps. When you buy ESX does it come with a built in tool to do this?

Thanks in advance!

[Lancegaydon1]

Forgot to mention we already have dpm 2007 as our enterprise backup solution but I didnt find any support for doing image level type backups

[jbruelasdgo · Accepted solution]

well, you could have a couple of options (from VMware perspective): VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) or VMware Data Recovery. The first one (VCB) probably would be the one to use with a third party (not sure that DPM is supported, but probably a third party vendor could have support for this)

Jose B Ruelas

[Lancegaydon1]

Using the vmware backup (not the consolidated backup solution) and I am trying to make sure I fully understand the procedure.

The first time I take the backup of a VM that is using say 20gigs of space total. I would imagine the size of the backup would be just that 20 gigs. Say i go to take a second backup a day later, that second backup will just be a delta and not the full 20 gigs? If this is the case, say I take a backup daily for a month, so there is now the one full plus 30 daily delta backups. I now want to restore, do i need to apply the full + the 30 daily deltas or only the full + the latest daily delta? Or am i completely wrong

Thanks!

[Lancegaydon1]

Should I be asking this in another community specific to backups?

[jbruelasdgo]

this is the one for Data Recovery and Backups:

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere/datarecovery-vcb?view=overview

Jose B Ruelas

http://aservir.wordpress.com