No frills Disaster Recovery of VMs

[jbshcmhc]

I have been testing VMWare with the free edition for a few months and really think that we can benefit from virtualization in our production network. So I downloaded Virtual Infrastructure 3 trial. I am currently still in the trail period but I have one ESX 3i server running with a couple of Windows 2k3 R2 VM's.

I did not set up a VI server but rather just used the VI client to configure and install the VM's and guest OS. In tinkering around the GUI of the VI client I found the datastore browser. Which will let me move files from the datastore to another location on my network. What I am uncertain of and cant seem to find any documentation on is using this method to download the entire contents of a VM to be used as a disaster recovery method. I do know that I cant download the VM folder...but I can select all of the files within a VM folder and move them to another location on the LAN. However once moved there are 2 more files in the copied folder than the original folder on the ESX box. So this makes me feel uncertain about the ability to use this method as a disaster recovery process.

I realize that there is VCB to do various types of backups on the VM's and their files...but currently we dont have an extra 2k3 server license to run that on. Hopefully in the future we can appropriate funds to procure said licenses and use that. But for now I would like a simple way to take a powered down VM(right after initial configuration) and copy it to another LAN area which then will be sent to tape to be kept off site. I will handle file backups with NT backup on the VM guest OS.

I am pretty sure that Veeam's FastSCP will do this for the free VMWare server....its just the VI Client datastore is what Im not so sure about.

Any input is greatly appreciated!

[esiebert7625]

There are a number of scripts that will do this, you also don't need to power it down, you can snapshot it while you make the snapshot then delete the snapshot afterwards. You also might try using VMware Converter to clone the server to network share.

Perl Backup Script for Vmware ESX - vmbk.pl ( free ) - http://www.vmts.net/vmbk.htm

Backup scripts - http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=23 and http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=156

Shell script - http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=475244

Perl script - http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=70253&start=0&tstart=0

Eric Siebert

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[jbshcmhc]

So are you saying that I am correct in my thinking that if I simply use VI Clients datastore browser to download the individual files inside the VM folder....that I can not upload these same files to a new VM created on a new ESX server.

For example lets say that I install ESX 3i or ESX 3.5 on "bare metal" and then create 2 new VM's(for example purpose I will name them VM1 and VM2). Then I install the guest OS(again for example windows 2k3 server). I set up the roles for each and configure both VM's to go live.

Right before going live I could browse the datastore and save all the files inside of VM1 and VM2 to 2 new folders on a remote LAN location identically named VM1 and VM2. Then for practical purposes lets say that the original ESX server dies. I build a new box and install ESX. I recreate 2 new VM's and instead of having to reinstall the guest OS and reconfig.....could I just upload the contents that I originally donwloaded from the original VM1 and VM2 to the new VM folders? Or would this not work.

I did not think about using VMware converter...so I will test this. But still would like to know if using the datastore browser to download the files would be another way of doing it.

Thanks for your input and I will check out your links later on this afternoon when I have some free time.

[esiebert7625 · Accepted solution]

Yes you could do that, an alternative to using the Datastore Browser is using FastSCP or WinSCP. All you will really need to copy is the vmdk files for the VM. If you ever need to rebuild your server you would copy the files back to the ESX server and then use vmkfstools -i to import the files into the VMFS volume, then create a new VM and tell it to use an existing disk file. Optionally you could copy all the files back and then just register the VM on the ESX host. It's important to use vmkfstools to copy to a VMFS volume as it allocates all disk at once so your VM disk file will not be fragmented.

Eric Siebert

VMware Communities User Moderator

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[jbshcmhc]

I have Veeams' FastSCP and I can connect to the free VMWare server...but not the ESX3i. Im assuming the firewall is blocking port 22. Since I started this post I have downloaded RCLI to try and open up the appropriate ports in order to use FastSCP. This I all learned from reading various things online. However when I realized I could download files with the datastore browser, I thought that having yet another thing on my desktop machine(RCLI windows installer) or yet running another appliance or instance in Linux...that I would just use the datastore browser. But when I copied the files over there were 2 extra files that wasnt in the original VM folder. Thus making me think that the downloader part of datastore browser was changing the structure of the files...thus making me wonder if I really could restore from these saves.

In closing I appreciate your input. I will test as many of your suggestions as my time will allow and decide which one will be best for my needs. Again, thank you.