How to protect Host if only one hard drive installed?

[vjbangis]

I have Intel Desktop Board DP965LT with Seagate 750 SATA HDD installed on ESXi 4.1. which is up and running.

4GB RAM and Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor.

My worries if that hard drive would fail, how can I image or mirror that hard drive?

Planning to run at least 4 guest OS.

Hope you could help me

Thanks in advance!

[Gerrit_Lehr]

Since you don't seem to run a cluster or a centralized storage to protect against harddrive failure the only redundancy option would be a raid system with several mirrored hard drives in the server. This how ever does not eleminate the need for a proper backup since it only protects againt hard-drive failure, not against data-loss within the VMs. Another cheap option would be a low-cost iscsi storage system with raid protected disks. But again, even if you protect the dicsc, you will need a proper backup solution which enables you to restore everything in case the data gets destroyed.

[vjbangis]

if I have NFS backup file server would it be suffice? How?

[AWo]

You could add your NFS export as a datastore and copy the .vmdk files over to that one on a regular basis. Maybe you can use scripts to quite the base volume (snapshot), copy it over and commit the snapshot.

AWo

[vjbangis]

it's my first time to run ESXi 4.1 live.

is the script to be run on Host using vCLI?

[AWo]

That and maybe http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/ps_pubs.html

AWo

[chriswahl]

If you're using the free edition of ESXi you won't be able to use vCLI to perform commands. It is limited to read-only.