vm ova backup

[maialen]

Hi,

I have two ESXi 6.0.0 and a shared storage. I have all virtual machines in the shared storage and they are in HA cluster between both ESXi hosts. I would like to generate *.ova files from my machines so that I can keep a backup of all of them. I can easily do this through vSphere client, however my network connection is not very good and so I wanted to generate *.ova files and store them in on partition in the shared storage and copy them later to an USB external drive.

I was having a look at ovftools and PowerCLI, not sure if i'm in the right path. Which one would be the best approach? I'd prefer avoiding netowk traffic as much as possible, so if it can be done as standalone in the ESXi, that would be great.

Any help is appreciated it.

Thank you!

[CrashTheGooner]

Hi Maialen,

Ideally recommended way is to export these VM's using web client or vsphere client as you mentioned.
However this will consume some bandwidth as it is lying on your shared storage.
Why don't you add a dedicated vswitch or port group and isolate this from the VM network PG.

Regards,
RGS

[maialen]

Thanks for the advise, but the problem is not the bandwidth that it will consume, I can actually perform the export at night without causing any interference with other vms but the problem is that I have crappy VPN connection and it takes forever to get the *.OVA files.

Best regards,

[vfk]

you should consider a backup solutions, Untrends offers free community version on their backup software http://www.unitrends.com/products/free-backup-software/unitrends-free - this might meet your needs.