ESXi - Backing up Virtual Machines

[tjcooper]

I am thinking about buying a Dell 380 G5 and using ESXi. I have a SATA SAN for data storage, but would host my VMS on the local SAS (or DAS) array. How would the VMs be backup up? Does ESXi have a backup function built in?

[nick_couchman]

Ah, no - this is a clever marketing ploy by VMware to push you into purchasing VC and their VCB solution in order to do backups. One possible solution is to have an ESX (not ESXi) server with the same VMFS share mounted and do the backups of the VMFS datastore via that machine. Another solution that's been suggested is to use an NFS server instead of VMFS and mount the NFS datastore on the ESXi machines - that way you can do the backups of the NFS server with normal backup software and you don't have to purchase anything additional from VMware.

[weinstein5]

No there is no backup function in ESXi - you have a number of options - one treat your VMs like physical machines and install a supported backup agent, VMware Consolidated Backup or products likevRanger or esXpress -

[tjcooper]

Can you elaborate?

I know NFS is Network File System and VMFS is Virtual Machine File System. So, you are suggesting an NFS Server be brought up to make the SATA SAN storage available. Then in ESXi, put the VMS on the now NFS shares?

That way you can back up the VMS from the NFS server.

Correct?

Now to find out if Windows can do NFS. I am not a Linux/Unix guru, so I rather use windows.

[leofonic]

You can do manual backups with the datastore browser. For scripted backups you need the backup space as an additional ESXi-datastore (to copy from one datastore to the other), so as nick said you need iscsi or nfs backup space as described here: .

Probably you still need some backup from within the VMs, because this way there is no file level and no incremental backup, just full.

[leofonic]

Personally i wouldn't put the VMs on shared storage for Backup purposes, you could leave them on local storage and rather copy them to shared storage for backup.

[tjcooper]

I am sure I am making this more complicated than it really is due to my unfamiliarity with VMs. I can bring up a new vm using a template and slap a system state restore on it (using TSM). That would bring me back up fairly quick.

[leofonic]

TSM is beyond my experience, but if it works with physical machines, it is likely to work with VMs the same way.

[weinstein5]

Yes TSM is supported in VI-3

[jcwuerfl]

From what I heard there will be some 3rd party backup programs that support ESXi that don't require VCB.