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xajhdfbb
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How to ghost/acronis a vmware ESXi production server?

Greetings, I am new to VMWare, just installed a VMWare ESXi 3.5 on HP DL380, it works really well.

is there a way to ghose/acronis/clone this whole physical ESXi server to a USB HDD or something like that?

Thanks in advance.

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Datto
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A follow-up -- with Ghost for Linux, you will be booting your ESX host off an ISO burned to CD Media, then booting the box from the CD media. From there, you will have options to write the disk image elsewhere. I use an FTP server as the destination for the image so I have all my ESX host images in the same spot, designated as what size disk and machine type and date by writing a long file name that does the description. Then, if I need to restore an image back to the originating ESX host, I get a listing of the filenames from the FTP server during the restore and just pick the correct image from the list.

I don't know for sure if G4L will recognize your USB disk or not -- probably depends upon what the chipset is and whether the G4L kernel has support for it. If you can bring your ESX host down and since G4L is free I'd just try it and see what happens.

Datto

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TobiasKracht
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ESX or VMs? Really no need to backup ESX, for VMs you can use ESX, VCB, Veeam Backup and etc, or even using VMs software.

StarWind Software R&D

StarWind Software R&D http://www.starwindsoftware.com
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Datto
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I use the free to download and use Ghost for Linux to clone an ESX host hard drive.

Try this link to download Ghost for LInux:

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Hardware/Ghost-for-Linux-053.shtml

Datto

DSTAVERT
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ESXi does not support USB attached disks. NAS devices supporting NFS can be used as an ESXi datastore and it is possible to use USB connected devices on the NFS server. There are several backup solutions including freely available scripts to backup the virtual machines. vRanger, Veeam, Trilead are some commercial tools. http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8760 for a wonderful script. There is no real need to backup the ESXi partitions but the configuration information can be collected using the downloadable VMA apppliance. You can grab it from the ESXi host web page where you downloaded the VI client.

-- David -- VMware Communities Moderator
Datto
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A follow-up -- with Ghost for Linux, you will be booting your ESX host off an ISO burned to CD Media, then booting the box from the CD media. From there, you will have options to write the disk image elsewhere. I use an FTP server as the destination for the image so I have all my ESX host images in the same spot, designated as what size disk and machine type and date by writing a long file name that does the description. Then, if I need to restore an image back to the originating ESX host, I get a listing of the filenames from the FTP server during the restore and just pick the correct image from the list.

I don't know for sure if G4L will recognize your USB disk or not -- probably depends upon what the chipset is and whether the G4L kernel has support for it. If you can bring your ESX host down and since G4L is free I'd just try it and see what happens.

Datto

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xajhdfbb
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Thanks a lot for all the help, Datto's way ghost to a FTP location is more suitable for me.

Thanks everyone.

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