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VMNETADMIN
Contributor
Contributor
‎05-25-2007 05:24 AM

Backing Up ESX 3.0.1 FileSystems

Need help using dump/restore utils to successfully backup and restore production server. Will consider almost any input to be helpful but if anyone has had 100% success with this and can offer detailed instructions I will be very appreciative!

I don't have any other BUR resources available other than open source. Please help.

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masaki
Virtuoso
Virtuoso
‎05-25-2007 06:01 AM

Which tools are you using?

There are specific actions for TSM or Legato.

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VMNETADMIN
Contributor
Contributor
‎05-25-2007 08:23 AM

We're not using anything proprietary. Need to install open source tools for LINUX such as dump/restore. You should see the man pages for this if you have a rhel or fedora install. They are not a part of the ESX install, I'm thinking about installing the rpms from sourceforge.

The other choice is to use Knoppix 5.0.1 from www.knoppix.org. When I use this there are two partitions that I can not access and I'm not sure what they are. I believe they are swap and vmfs. Not sure if VMFS is already mounted under / if it is then I think I'm OK. I've backed up the other partitions using dump. Need to test restore now.

Looking for someone to do this with or who has done this before.

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dominic7
Virtuoso
Virtuoso
‎05-25-2007 09:47 AM

I can't say that I am intimately familiar with dump/restore, but I did a quick search

"This is the home page of the Linux Ext2 filesystem dump/restore utilities.

Dump examines files in a filesystem, determines which ones need to be backed up, and copies those files to a specified disk, tape or other storage medium. Subsequent incremental backups can then be layered on top of the full backup."

It looks like dump/restore were written for ext2/3, which means you will likely have no luck getting them to work with VMFS2/3. The 2 partitions that you are having trouble seeing are probably your VMFS partition, and your vmkcore ( VMware Core Dumps ).

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Rumple
Virtuoso
Virtuoso
‎05-25-2007 09:59 AM

The real question should be if the backup/restore of ESX is worth the work.

I'd put the work into a scripted install of ESX and if it dies, just run the scripted install which will probably take considerably less time then doing a dump/restore.

I can build an ESX server and manually configure for my environment in under 30 minutes.

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VMNETADMIN
Contributor
Contributor
‎05-25-2007 12:21 PM

Is VMFS mounted on / ? If so then I probably have backed it up. I need to test restore now assuming that it is there.

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VMNETADMIN
Contributor
Contributor
‎05-25-2007 12:23 PM

Scripted install of baseline binaries is not sufficient. We have a hardened and patched install. A scripted install will not include the updates or our hardening.

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Rumple
Virtuoso
Virtuoso
‎05-25-2007 12:30 PM

I'm not sure what extra harding you do, but that 30 minutes included the patching. I scp the patches over on first bootup and type ./patchinstall and leave it for 15 minutes.

Everything else has to be done manually like re-plug the vmfs and remount the vmfs luns on the san.

/vmfs is not off the / partition as its a seperate file system and you can't typically just run a backup against it unless all vm's are turned off

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