backup VM's and then restore them

[charger]

Hi,

I have been searching quite a bit for a solution to my issue and have found little bits and pieces, but nothing that specifically addresses what I need to do:

VMWare ESX Server 3.0.1

being managed by

VMware VirtualCenter 2.0.1

I need to reconfigure storage on the ESX server machine (reconfigure RAID).

I have 5 VM's on the ESX server that I need to save.

How do I save these VM's?

I have looked at exporting the vdisks to a mounted nfs and this seems easy enough...but how do I save all of the associated files that define the VM (.vmx etc). And once I have the server back up and ESX reinstalled how do I re-add the VM's?? (I don't see any option to "add an existing VM to inventory" in the VirtualCenter UI)

I haven't been able to get a definitive answer on this and any help is greatly appreciated.

Mike

[JaySMX]

Backup the whole directory that the VM files are in. To add them back, create new VM using the Custom wizard, name it the same as the server you're restoring and give it the same specs, select "Use an existing virtual disk" from the Select Disk page and point it to that server's .vmdk file.

[charger]

Thanks for the reply.

To backup the whole directory can I just tar the thing and save it to an nfs mount? Do I need to use vmkfstools?

Is there no way to use the existing vmx file to restore the VM? (I seem to remember that in VMware workstation I could add an existing VM to the inventory)

What if I had 100 VM's? Would I have to recreate each one of them? (I understand that I can use the existing vdisk files but ...I would have to recreate each and every VM definition to restore???)

Mike

[ksteinme]

You can do this in this way:

Shutdown each vm.

You have to unregister all virtual machines 'vmware-cmd -s unregister '

Klaus

[admin]

I've written a backup utility to automate backups, sounds like it woud fit your scenario perfectly, and it's free, you can find it here:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~alexm/visbu-0.8.5.tar.gz

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~alexm/README

There's more infor about it in this thread.

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=70253

[petedr]

If you are looking for a free backup solution to help out with this you can take a look at esXpress http://www.esxpress.com works great and is fully supported.