Backing up with ESX/ESXi

slylittlefox

slylittlefox

slylittlefox

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Our company has for a long time used VMware server for our virtualisation, but it has come to a point where performance is taking a big hit from doing so.

With the advent of ESXi being shipped for free, we're looking at moving. One of our biggest concerns is how we'd manage backups after the move. At present we do a rather cumbersome stop the vm/backup the vm/start the vm routine every night, and want to know if this is possible to do with ESX/ESXi.

I've looked into VCB and although it seems to do exactly what we want, it carries a hefty price tag, which ideally we'd like to avoid. My first thought was running VMware Converter on top of the VMs, then backing up the generated VM from Converter to tape, meaning no more down time.

However - VMware Converter is designed to convert physical machines into VMs, will it work creating a VM from a VM? Has anybody tried this?

Also, does anybody know of any other (preferably free) backup solutions/processes that we could try?

All ideas/help appreciated :)
 
As an aside: is VCB available to run as a 'bolt-on', rather than having to purchase the entire VMware infrastructure suite? And will VCB work with ESXi? :confused:

They know how to sting you once you start moving over to the 'i' version ;)
 
Shoei said:
I use esxranger for backing up my VM's on ESX. lets you do some fancy other stuff as well.
You can use it to move VM's from one ESX to another, just back up from one and restore to the new ESX server, plus you can do a file level restore from the backed up VM. It's licensed per physical CPU on the ESX server.
Backups can be scheduled as well.
Click to expand...

Just had a quick look at ESXranger - looks like it could fit the bill quite nicely - how much do you pay for it if you don't mind me asking? :)
 
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