Christian Völker <chrischan AT knebb DOT de> wrote on 09/10/2009 05:36:27 PM:

> Thanks for the great mail. It subsummed really nearly everything which
> is related to all this.

Thank you.  I'm glad it helped.

> Just one point where you seem to be wrong:
> You mentioned "VMware tools" (don't get confused with the "official"
> VMware Tools running inside the guest) which are only available on ESXi
> for money.
> Are you aware of the VI Perl Toolkit? That contains Perl and a couple of
> Perl scripts you can execute remotely even without a VirtualCenter
> server.

Yes.  VMware keeps changing the name of the stupid server management tools 
(Virtual Infrastructure?  VirtualCenter?  vSphere?  Who cares!) so I 
called it "VMware tools" to cover it.  Probably a bad choice.

As for the VI Perl Toolkit:  I had kinda forgotten about it in the context 
of ESXi.  I *know* that in the context of VMware *Server* it's nearly 
useless.  The important things (like adding and dropping snapshots) are 
removed in Server!  But I don't know if they're available to ESXi.  I'll 
have to look.

But that misses the much more important point:  how do I get the data into 
and out of an ESXi environment?  I can't access the filesystem--there's no 
way to copy the files into or out of the datastore!  Even if the Perl 
Toolkit can automate the entire snapshot process, it won't transfer the 
files.  That's where VMware forces you into vCenter.

> And as far as I know VMware has a Linux vApp with the installed
> toolkit ready to download. So this should solve a lots of issues as it
> offers the same functionality (for free!) to ESXi as a standalon ESX
> has. Just remotely. As far as I remember you can even do some stuff
> directly to ESXi instead of the need of VirtualCenter [not sure, I have
> always a VirtualCenter running ;)].

No.  The ESXi console is a single screen that allows you to set the host's 
IP address and *very* little else.  You can use VirtualCenter, or you can 
use VirtualCenter.  (Or use the "unsupported" ssh hack, which I refuse to 
depend on for production.)

> > *could* shut down the guest, make an LVM snapshot, restart the guest 
and 
> > use the LVM snapshot to perform a block-level rsync-style (or even 
> > cp-style) copy of the images. 
> Re taking snapshots of the guest instead of shutting down. With
> journaling file systems this shouldn't be an issue. I use ext3 with
> "data=ordered" thus preventing any issues with the filesystem during a
> snapshot/ backup.

Good luck!  I wouldn't give a plug nickel for that as a disaster plan... 
:)  But to each his own:  basically, you're avoiding a simple reboot once 
every three months and putting yourself in a situation where you will be 
very likely pulling the virtual plug on your virtual machine--and in a 
disaster situation, no less.  That's not an exchange I would 
make--data=ordered notwithstanding...  :)

But remember:  I am *not* using image-level backups for daily backups. 
They *certainly* won't allow me to avoid backing up files inside of the 
guest anyway:  how do you restore a *single* file from an image backup? 
So, seeing as I'm gonna have BackupPC around anyway, I merely make a clone 
of the VM once a quarter or so, and depend on BackupPC to restore my data 
between my (old) clone and the backup that was done last night.  *VERY* 
straightforward.

> I just removed my snapshot and realized I have data growth about 8GB/
> day. So not too much. I have to figure out now a way how to perform
> backups of the pool....block based as any filesystem based ones failed
> up to now.

You're talking about a virtualized BackupPC installation?  I haven't done 
that.  My VMware machines all use expensive storage (15k RPM SAS drives, 
for example).  The whole point of BackupPC is to use cheap, plentiful 
storage, so I've had no reason to virtualize BackupPC.  I simply run it on 
(two) dedicated machines with cheap SATA drives...

Tim Massey


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