Vmsnap question(s)

[virtualesxer]

In a Vmware whitepaper I just read: "The vmsnap and vmres Perl scripts available from VMware as a stand-alone download use scripting API commands. As of ESX Server 2.5 these are shipped with the product." Um, where? I don't see them. Point is, I want to make automatic, daily snapshot 'backups' of my VMs (to a local datastore section). I found a script somewhere, on the net, called vmbk.pl, but it's from 2006 and still assumes you have a 5.6.1 Perl installation. Useless, therefore. So, it looks I'm stuck with vmsnap, after all.

What I don't understand about vmsnap, though, is that it allegedly can only make snapshots of running VMs. Which seems odd to me, as this means you cannot create a 'base' backup (to which all further snapshots are relative), because once powered on, that VM has already changed state! (in the sense that you cannot restore a 'base' + snapshot) I wonder if someone could please clarify this.

Thanks.

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

These scripts used a pre-cursor to the snapshot technology in VI 3 called a Redo Log - basically a redo log was created for the virtual disk - it was to this redo log changes were written so that with the vmsnap script you could make a copy of the entire VMDK - this was a crash consitent copy isnce since impending file system writes were commtted before the redo log was created -

[virtualesxer]

Okay, thanks for the explanation.