Hi,
Before you install bacula (or anything else) on an ESX server itself
consider that you will probably find that you will no longer have
technical support from VMware. This is what I was informed of by a
Vmware engineer when I mentioned I wanted to install munin-node to
monitor ESX...ie any 3rd party software will void support. So you may
find you have to remove any tools etc beofre they take an interest,
especially if this effects or upgrades Perl.
Esx is itself quite simple and does not really need backing up
IMHO....so keep 2 cds handy, one iso for ESX 3.x and maybe a cd-rw of
the latest patchset, currently March 2008.
While ESX 3.0.2 uses RH ES3 (I think 3.5 does as well, I need to check,
3i does not). This is a management station that runs on top of the
Vmware kernel, my understanding is the RH ES3 instance boots then swaps
in the VMware kernel/system to run on.
As for Vmware's consolidated backup, yet another person thinks it
sucks....seems to be most people.
"If you back up the virtual disk files without
using consolidated backup or vmkfstools you may run into trouble."
Definately, stick to Vmware's tools, When I first started with ESX I
tried tar'ing up and also cp'ing complete (turned off machines) to
alterative partitons/clusters, the result was un-bootable!
I think the biggest thing to watch on ESX is it is in fact not "really"
Linux, ie all you know about Linux can get you in deep doo doo if you
ssh in and start running "normal" Linux commands, been there done
that.....you have to find and use Vmware's equiv.
regards
Steven
Jeff Dickens wrote:
> I back up a number of virtual machines that are hosted on ESX. I simply
> treat each one as a separate server. My Bacula director runs in a
> virtual machine, as does an SD that back up 30 windows boxes.
>
> Also, I have a script that exports the system disk of each virtual
> machine to a samba share using the vmkfstools command. I run this
> manually once a month. If you back up the virtual disk files without
> using consolidated backup or vmkfstools you may run into trouble.
>
> So, if my ESX server were to be wiped all I would need to do is
> reinstall ESX on a virgin server and import my saved virtual machines.
> It beats the bare-metal restore problem completely. I've also carried
> virtual machines around on Rev disks from site to site or even on DVD-Rs
> since the export compresses them pretty well. The script also handles
> shutting down the virtual machines and backing up the config files, etc
> so you can use vmware converter to re-import them. It doesn't back up
> the "data" disks on the servers; I leave that to Bacula. A nice site
> effect is that in a pinch you can boot your VMs up on vmware server,
> which I have running on the system that gets the backups.
>
> Let me know if you're interested, and I'll mail it to you.
>
>
> Robert LeBlanc wrote:
>>
>> On 4/15/08 1:01 AM, "Arno Lehmann" <al AT its-lehmann DOT de> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> 15.04.2008 01:11, Robert LeBlanc wrote:
>>>
>>>> Ok,
>>>> We¹ve messed with Consolidate Back-up for ESX and I don¹t like it, I
>>>> tried to NFS mount our VMFS volumes on the Bacula SD to back them up and
>>>> it seems as ESX can not export VMFS, so I¹m back to where I started many
>>>> months ago and getting Bacula working on ESX.
>>>>
>>> Great. I don't know VMWare ESX that well :-)
>>>
>>>
>>>> I am not a Red Hat person
>>>> by any means, we use Debain for everything. So I have a few questions.
>>>> First, I think that ESX 3.5 is using Red Hat Enterprise 3.x, would that
>>>> seems feasible?
>>>>
>>> I don't know. But if it does, there are rpms for RHEL3 available which
>>> are used by at least one of my customers. Just point your browser to
>>> http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=50727&package_id=76408
>>> and you'll find a bacula-client-2.2.8-1.el3.i386.rpm file, which would
>>> be worth a try.
>>>
>>
>> I feel like such an idiot, I made sure to check before putting noise on the
>> list. The package installed without a hitch. The last time, there were a few
>> libraries out of date.
>>
>>
>>>> It looks like it was originally released in 2003.
>>>> Second, what CentOS (I know that CentOS is a Œfree¹ version of Red Hat
>>>> Enterprise) version would I use?
>>>>
>>> None, as long as you can use the more specific rpms.
>>>
>>>
>>>> Third, are RPMs built for that version
>>>> of CentOS? I only seem to find RPMs for Fedora Core and SUSE. Fourthly,
>>>> if there is no pre-built RPMs, I see that there is general building
>>>> instructions in the Documentation, but is there a good (i.e. Easy)
>>>> resource for building RPM packages for Bacula?
>>>>
>>> Yes, just download and install the source rpm and run rpmbuild with
>>> the appropriate command line switches. You'll need a full development
>>> environment, though, which might not be on the VMWare server.
>>>
>>
>> I would try to avoid building on the ESX host at all possible, hence the
>> build on CentOS and then copy the RPM to the ESX host. I guess I will need
>> to learn how to package Bacula in any case seeing how binaries won't be
>> released for the next version.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Robert
>>
>>
>>> Arno
>>>
>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Robert
8><---
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference
Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100.
Use priority code J8TL2D2.
http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone
_______________________________________________
Bacula-users mailing list
Bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
|
