Backing up images w/o SAN

[chriskchung]

I am curious, is there a simple way to backup VM images on an ESX server

I basically want to be able to backup hosts onto a NAS device. Can I do this through virtual center or vcb?

If I use VCB, do I need a seperate server for backup or can I use a machine hosted on one of the esx servers?

TIA

[lamw · Accepted solution]

You don't need a SAN to just do backups. Most SMBs can backup to external storage or something like NFS, so long as the VCB proxy server that's either installed on a physical host or VM or even with VC can see the external storage. You can use either VCB or something like vRanger to do your nightly/scheduled backups. Take a look at the best practice and VCB documents for further details as there's different types of backup policy (file level, full).

[kjb007]

lamw is correct. You don't need to have a SAN to use VCB, and your proxy can be physical or a vm. The vcb proxy will have to be able to "see" the datastore that the vm's are created on. This can be done by using vcb in network based disk (nbd) access mode. It is an additional option that you use with vcbMounter command instead of the typical san method.

-KjB

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Check out http://vmprofessional.com/index.php?content=esx3backups for a comparison of backup tools. None of these tools mentioned require SAN or any remote storage to use.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization