Backing Up ESXi 3.5

[aix0]

Hi

Just a quick question, well more of an interest really...

I was wondering what people use to back their ESXi servers up? Do people generally go for VCB? Or other third party solutions? I use the VI Perl Toolkit to backup my ESXi boxes and that works quite nicely, best thing is it's free!

I didn't want to go Backup Exec, I wanted to back the VMFS volume up as apposed to the VMs filesystem, so I could have the VMDKs sitting on another server.

Just wondered what other people are using?

Martin

 

[aix0]

I forgot all about this post, I really wish I'd have seen that thread a few weeks ago! It'd have made coding my backup script a lot easier. There's also a good point that I wasn't aware of, the fact that you have to backup the VMX file before creating a snapshot. I better get editing.

I'm by no stretch of the imagination an ESXi or Perl guru, but I came up with a script that takes a snapshot and then uses scp to copy the files from the VMFS volume and it works just great for me.

What I can't figure out, which would make my script just a little more elegant is, what property would return the path of the Virtual Machine's associated files i.e. VMDK, VMX etc. Anyone?

Martin