Good day.
Please be gentle. I am a tyro.
We are a 24 hour 7 day operation for which down time is critical.
We are running free ESXi 5.0 and wish to update to free ESXi 5.5U1. We have 3 VMs on one thick provisioned lazy zero 2.08TB datastore: 2 Windows 2008 Server R2 Standard and a 32 bit Windows 2003 Server. The provisioned storage for the Windows 2003 Server is 104.5GB. The provisioned storage for one Windows 2008 Server R3 is 102.22GB and the provisioned storage for the other Windows 2008 Server R2 is 1.60TB.
I feel the need to back up these VMs in case disaster should befall us during the update procedure. My question is how to back up the VMs with minimum down time? From what I have read snapshots are not suitable for this purpose. The only solution I have so far is to shut down the VMs and copy them to another drive using rsync or scp with compression.
Anyone have some better solutions?
Thanks,
David Chapman
Welcome to the Community,
you are right, backup is always a good idea and snapshots are no backup replacements. With the free Hypervisor you are actually limited with image/VM based backup options. The only application I'm aware of which supportes the free Hypervisor edition is Trilead's VM-Explorer.
Anyway, for a 24x7 environment it might be a good idea to have an automated/scheduled backup in place. What you may consider - I'm no salesman and it's up to you - is to get a vSphere Essentials license and a backup application. Veeam for instance ooffers a special priced Essentials edition.
Regarding the upgrade, make sure your hardware is supported for ESXi 5.5 and also consider to upgrade the host's firmware.
André
Thank you for this reply, André. My latest experimenting has been with a 2TB drive as a separate datastore that I attach to the virtual machines one at a time and do bare metal backups using Windows Server Backup. I do not, however, have a clear picture of how a restore would work.. I have read:
that I could boot off the Windows Server 2008 R2 installation disk and recover from a disaster.
I have check the HCL. The only thing we have that is not supported is the Adapetc 29320LPE. We plan to replace this controller with an Adaptec 2120S, which is supported.
There is an update fore the BIOS at Asus, but I'm reluctant to update without a compelling reason to do so.
I can't get the Powers That Be to spring for a licence. I will keep working on them.......
Thanks again,
David Chapman
It is not possible to have a VMDK than 2TB. how is that you have 2.08TB in size on ESXi hypervisors, are you doing in-guest software raid or are these LUNs presented as RDM?
If you can get the "Powers That Be" to agree to a vSphere Essentials license, then Veeam Backup Free Edition could deal with your migration situation.
Veeam Backup Free Edition for virtual machines (VeeamZIP)
It has a feature called Quick Migration that, in the case of vSphere Essentials where you don't have vMotion, would use Veeam's SmartSwitch functionality to migrate the VMs between hosts. It's not quite like vMotion and it does temporarily suspend the VMs, however it minimizes the time required to migration them as much as possible.
Further to a.p.'s comment about you being in a 24/7 critical shop, vSphere Essentials Plus would get you vMotion, HA and DP as well. Good luck!
Hi, vfk and Dee.
There are 3 VMs in this datastore. From the output of '/vmfs/volumes/511419b2-4abe8d0d-5110-3085a906f045 # du -sh *' one VM is 1.6TB, the second 104.1GB and the other 102.2GB.
I am still pushing for the Essentials licence From what I have read it is good to 6 CPUs and would cost around $600 CDN.
I liked the idea of using a separate datastore for the Windows Server backups as it is quite fast compared to a USB or network destination. Perhaps this is not a viable solution, though?
Thanks again, folks
David Chapman
Well ideally you want to keep your backups away from the environment being backed up. So I would look to store the Windows Server backups "somewhere else", and preferably offsite for DR purposes. Depending on your backup solution that could be as simple as a file share. If you're concerned with backup speed, disk usually trumps other options. Once your backup's on disk though, you should get it onto something portable, whether that's an external drive, tape, or cloud based backup solution. Note that those options are listed in order of "recoverability" where each option is more likely to be viable in the long run.
This, of course, speaks to backups as more of an ongoing operational requirement and not a one-off such as your requirement to backup the VMs during a host upgrade.
Hello again everyone.
I have convinced the powers that be that a VMware Essentials licence is a 'good thing'. The remaining question is what is the 'subscription'? We are going for the 3 year plan. Does this mean that the VMware Essentials licence must be renewed every 3 years? Can we opt out of the subscription after 3 years and still run our VMware Essentials? Or is the subscription to do with support from VMware?
Thanks again,
David Chapman
With an active "Subscription" you are entitled to software upgrades (new major versions) free of charge. If you want/need "Support" from VMware you can purchase this separately, see VMware Incident Support. For both - subscription and support - it's up to you whether to renew or not. If you decide not to renew subscription you can still continue to use the current version.
André
Thank you André. This is exactly what I was looking for.
I'll be begging help once more when we get the licence. :smileygrin:
Thanks again,
David Chapman
