I guess we cheat - we pause the VM for the duration of the backup, and 
simply back up the host. This results in a complete system backup of the 
VM, and we get full speed backup of a few large files each night. We can 
do this happily because none of our VMs are very large - 10GB at most - 
so not too much tape space is used. Our large data set (~3TB) is not 
virtualised.
When the host is upgraded, or the VMs are moved somewhere other than 
that SLES9 box[1], we'll have a newer version of LVM such that we can 
pause the VM, create an LVM snapshot, resume the VM, perform a raw 
backup of the snapshot, then delete the snapshot. Much less downtime for 
the VM.

[1] For some reason, we can't currently delete LVM snapshots without a 
lot of work including host reboots. This would require huge disk space 
wastage or unacceptable reboots!

Brian Debelius wrote:
> I've never achieved more then about 10MBs from Server running under SUSE 
> 9.  I am moving things to ESX right now.  I have not benchmarked the 
> raid yet, but a single disk was around 45MBs
> 
> Keith Sudbury wrote:
>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> I have a CentOS box running a LTO-3 SCSI drive and I am currently 
>> getting abour 7 / 8 MB/s from a Windows 2003SBS machine running on the 
>> CentOS box. This is the only VM on the box and the server has no load.
>>
>> The box is a new Dell server of reasonable spec and has the Vmware is 
>> running in "bridged" mode for networking, the drive are SATA and 
>> confisured in a RAID5 (with a real hw card). I'm not expecting a rocket 
>> but 7mb/s ???
>>
>> I am wondering if any of you have experianced any thing simular?
>>
>>
>> Many Thanks
>>
>>   
> 
> 
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