Backing up clones and templates

[lavinl]

We are trying to come up with a disaster recovery procedure to put our clones and templates in a safe place. At present we have a SAN device with no mirror copy capabilities in place and need a way to backup the templates and clones. Any suggestions? Has anyone done this?

[lholling]

There are some commercial products available to do this but at the moment we use a combination of cron and the visbu script which you can get from the following url http://www.xtravirt.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=75&func=fileinfo&id=7

We have an smb mount to a Windows box and back the drive that these images go to once a week.

Leonard...

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[JohnSilver]

Well, you can also take a look at esxRanger from vizioncore, a commercial product that does this job; it's only clicking.

Otherwise you can script it with vcbMounter and vcbRestore. You will find a lot to it in "Virtual Machine Backup Guide", a pdf document from vmware (vi3_vm_backup.pdf or so..)

[petedr]

Hey lavini.

Our new 3.1 version of esXpress can now backup ESX Templates in addition to the normal VM image backups. It can set templates to go their own special defined backup target ( ftp/ssh/smb )

Pete@esxpress

[JohnSilver]

Hi petedr,

sorry, sorry for forgetting esXpress. Thats another option of course.

We have some ESX Servers with local storage only. The disks of our VMs are all thinprovisioned to save space. Can you backup and restore VMs with esXpress, keeping the disks thinprovisioned?