VMware Cloud Community
user9922
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Quickest way to backup a VM without Veeam

I'm using ESXi 6.0 U2....free version and cannot use Veeam (i believe).

I want to backup a VM, it's okay it is stopped, but for a shortest possible time.

My own suggestion:

I think the best way would be to make an OVF of the VM.

But to keep the down-time as short as possible I would like to export to a OVF located on the same host (but in another datastore located on another disk) perhaps with the fastest compression.
1st question: Using the ovftool, is it possible to specify a local datastore on the same host as target? If so how?
I tried something like:

ovftool -ds=DataStore2 vi://root:MyPW@srv01/vm1 vi://root:MyPW@srv01 srv01backup.ovf

2nd question: If I use ovftool from my local windows client pc.....will data be transferred to my PC and then back to the host or will the host understand to do it directly to it's own datastore?

3nd question: Can I do an OVF export directly on the ESXi host. e.g. connecting to the host using SSH and type a command?
For now I only know of two ways: Using the web-client and using the UI (but data will for sure be transfered directly to my PC). Or using ovftool from my PC.

One could ask, why not make a OVF directly to my backup-archive? Because I believe transferring the OVF files directly over the network will make the backup time longer, and therefore having the VM being stopped for a longer time. I get transfer-speed between 15-30MB/sec....I was hoping to get a lot more doing and disk-to-disk transfer on the host.

Any other way of doing this?
I know I could just copy all the VMs files from the datastore, but I don't like it too much as it can get complicated with snap-shorts, memory files etc.

Tags (2)
Reply
0 Kudos
0 Replies