Copy / backup vmdk disk from ESXi to SMB share (or ftp site)

[Astro]

Hi all

The test lab:

- ESX 3.5i Update 2 installable on HP Proliant 380 G5. Local storage VMFS (no RDM disk).

- 1 VM Windows 2003 using 1 flat disk

The problem: how can I dump/copy the disk of the guest from a Windows client to a SMB share (or a ftp site) ?

I tried to use vmkfstools.pl through RCLI, but it seems not working.

The only working mode of vmkfstools.pl seems to be to cloning the disk on another data store VMFS.

Any ideas ?

Many thanks

Max

[10nico]

Natively ESXi can't mount samba shares, however it can mount NFS and iSCSI, so I suppose you could :

1) Enable SSH access to the ESXi host and then mount the NFS share and do a CP of your files over to the NFS share

or

2) Enable SSH access to the ESXi host and do an SCP towards an SSH enabled host (pushing the data to the SSH-enabled host)

or

3) Enable SSH access to the ESXi host and connect to it from the host that has the SMB share, and do an scp from there (pulling the data from the ESXi)

I acknowledge that none of this methods is optimal but they all shoudl get the job done.

On the performance side, I'd say the first method should be the fastest because NFS is unencrypted while SSH is and this slows down things (I never got more than 10MB/sec with SSH/SCP)

If someone has other ideas I'd like to see them!

Cheers,

Michele

[eBiBy]

You can also connect to the Web-Interface of the ESXi, choose browse Datastore and download the needed file through you web browser and save is into the share.

Sven

[jbusch]

If you use the DS browser you don't see all files, or so I learned from another post.

Try using the DS browser and, say, FastSCP side by side and compare.

-jdb