I'm happy using ESXpress www.esxpress.com to get the actual vm's. There 
is a free version if you want to just try it out.

Dan Trainor wrote:
>
> Hi, all –
>
> I’m faced with a pretty unique situation that I can’t quite think of a 
> way in which Bacula can effectively back up exactly what I’m trying to 
> back up.
>
> The ultimate goal is to be able to run incremental, differential, and 
> full backups.
>
> Playing around with some performance numbers and we’ve found at least 
> a 10x speed improvement when using an iSCSI target from our VMWare 
> host as a raw device for the VM, over a file-based device for the VM 
> which would reside on that same VM host. Although that’s great, I’m 
> still not comfortable doing that given the fact that we can’t reliably 
> back up the data.
>
> I’m looking for an effective way to back up any and all of these VMs, 
> and the problem resides with the method by which we are actually using 
> the target. The original idea was to use LVM to take snapshots and 
> thereby manage incremental and differential backups. However, VMWare – 
> using that iSCSI target as a raw device – would leave that device as 
> type LVM, but rather, whatever filesystem that the host uses. Even if 
> that wasn’t an issue, it would still defeat the purpose of using iSCSI 
> devices, since VMWare would then have to be forced to create a 
> file-based filesystem for the guest. Catch-22, you know? To make 
> things even better, we’re going to have quite a few Windows VMs, too.
>
> I’d rather also not use bacula-fd from within the vmware guest, as I 
> don’t want to double-up on the iSCSI path usage – however, this may be 
> our only choice. If I can simply backup from the raw device and also 
> find a way to do incremental and differential backups off of that, 
> that would be quite ideal.
>
> It looks like right now the only way to actually get a snapshot of 
> that device (rather, vmware disk) is to use some proprietary software 
> by VMWare. Although I’m not completely opposed to that, I’d like to 
> stick with Bacula, iSCSI, and some good old fashioned hackery.
>
> Thanks
>
> -dant
>
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