Seems to me that just backing up the image file to each virtual
machine gives you nothing in the way of incremental backups. This may
be fine if you're only using vmware as a consolidation platform for
small servers, but strikes me as wasteful if you do anything large on
it. Also, you'd lose the ability to recover individual files from
inside the instance without recovering the whole thing, starting an
instance using it, and then extracting the files. (or ... i forget ...
does vmware ship with a utility to loopback mount the image files and
manipulate the files in them?)

-Charlie

On 5/25/05, Svein Ingve Wik <SWik AT oslo.westerngeco.slb DOT com> wrote:
>  Hi,
> 
>  We've started to look at VMware, it seems like a nice platform.
> 
>  Isn't enough just to backup the image file of each virtual machine?
> 
>  
>  Rgds,
> 
>  Svein Ingve
> 
> 
>  At 07:28 25.05.2005, you wrote:
>  
> Hi,
>   
>  We also backup VMWare, but we just use one agent per host. All VMs are
> suspended by script before being backed up. This is done using the
> bpstart_notify and bpend_notify scripts. These call a subscript which
> actually suspends the VMs. This method works fine and recoverability is
> good.
>   
>  We are investigating the option of installing a SAN Media server instance
> on each VMWare host. This would facilitate the host to backup directly to
> tape, using its own HBA instead of streaming the data to a Media Manager
> first.
>   
>  Kind regards,
>  Kaspar Bosma
>  System Enigeer
>   
>  ________________________________
>  
>  Van: veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> [mailto:veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] Namens
> Conner, Mike
>  Verzonden: dinsdag 24 mei 2005 20:27
>  Aan: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
>  Onderwerp: [Veritas-bu] Backing up VMWare - best practices
>   
>  Just curious if anyone is backing up any instances of VMWare clients.  We
> have been told by Veritas that we can purchase one agent to backup all
> instances.  VMWare is saying that we will need a client for each virtual
> machine.  Anyone with any experience here have any info?
>  Thanks
>  Mike