I think there are two schools of thought.

1. Run FD on the host and backup a snapshot of the running VM's storage.
2. Run FD in the VM and backup as any other machine.

The advantages of 1 are simpler backup and faster, simpler restore in a 
disaster recovery situation. The disadvantages of 1 are that it uses 
more backup storage and there isn't any way to restore individual files 
to the VM.

The advantages of 2 are smaller overall backup storage requirements and 
the possibility to restore individual files to a running VM. The 
disadvantage is a more complex disaster recovery procedure.

My current strategy with Linux KVM VMs is to run FD in the VMs. On the 
host machine, I keep an image that is essentially a bootable rescue disk 
that contains bacula-fd and a minimal install of the same OS the VMs 
run. The rescue disk image gets backed up with the host machine. The 
rescue image is only needed for disaster recovery. Restoring individual 
files to the running VM is exactly the same as restoring to a real 
machine. For disaster recovery, I dd the rescue image to the VM's boot 
storage, then boot the VM and do a full restore in like manner to 
restoring a real machine. I believe this method is more flexible for 
general use, and the more complex disaster recovery is not overly 
troublesome.

However, it depends on your needs. If fast disaster recovery is more 
important than the ability to restore individual files, or because there 
are a lot of VMs, then method 1 might be more appropriate. In my case, 
the VMs run on a two-node HA cluster, and so the death of one node 
machine would not affect the VMs at all, thus the ability to restore 
individual files on the VM is more important. YMMV.


Carlo Filippetto wrote:
> Hi all,
> I would like to backup my virtual machine VMDK on ESXi 3.5
> There's a way to do it with the machine on and I have a consistent bck?
> What kind of change I have to do?
>
> Otherwise.. I can make a hot clone of my VM and backup it?
>
> Thank's
>
> CIAO
> Carlo
>
>   

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