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mhashemi
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Contributor

Is this possible?

First, a little about our environment. We have three copies of VMWare Server 1.x running on Windows hosts with Windows guests. We also have one copy of ESX 3.5i running Windows guests. We typically just let the machines sit there, though we do back them up with ntbackup from within the guest.

I'd like to turn our physical Blackberry Enterprise server into a virtual machine (using Converter?) and load it onto the ESX host. That part seems pretty straight forward.

Then, I'd like to setup a second ESX 3.5i host and move nightly snapshots of the Blackberry server to it. That way, if something happens to our production VM, I can just power-on the snapshot copy and be on my way.

I'm not worried about live migration at this point.

Thanks

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vmroyale
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Immortal

Hello and welcome to the forums.

This won't work the way you describe it. The snapshots alone are worthless without the base disks associated with them. You could script something out to take a nightly snapshot and then copy the original VMDK files over to the other server.

Good Luck!

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com
mhashemi
Contributor
Contributor

Am I correct in understanding that the server needs to be powered off to copy the original files? If yes, can you describe a possible alternative that'd let me keep the server up while creating a "copy" I can start on another server? I've recently read that there are backup solutions, but I don't know of any specifics. Would something like that work?

Thanks.

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vmroyale
Immortal
Immortal

Am I correct in understanding that the server needs to be powered off to copy the original files?

Not necessarily. If you take a snapshot of it, you can then copy off the original VMDK files without powering it off.

>If yes, can you describe a possible alternative that'd let me keep the server up while creating a "copy" I can start on another server? I've recently read that there are backup solutions, but I don't know of any specifics. Would something like that work?

Check out the ghettoVCB.sh script.

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com