On 6/18/08 7:22 AM, "Keith Sudbury" <keith AT netzensolutions DOT com> wrote:
> I am just setting up a backup job for a CentOS box the runs a 2003sbs
> server in a VM using VMWare. What is the best way to back this up? shut
> the machine down and take a snapshot archive the image? then exclude the
> image from the backup?
>
> The server it's self is backed up traditionally, has the windows
> bacula-fd on there.
>
>
> Cheers
There are three ways of doing this. First, file level back-up in the VM
using the bacula-fd, the restore will have to rebuild the entire machine.
The second is to shut down the VM and back-up as you specified in your
e-mail. The advantage is that your VM is in a good state for restore and you
don't have to rebuild the VM after restoring the vmdk and vmx files, you do
have to power off the VM for the entire time the back-up is running (can
easily be scripted using Bacula). The third option is to create a snapshot
of the running VM, back-up all but the last vmdk file (when you try to back
it up, Bacula can't read it). This offers the advantage of the previous
method minus, the VM is restored in a crash state, but you didn't have to
power down the VM for the back-up. You may have to edit the vmx files and do
a little clean up during the restore process.
We implement methods 1 and 3 in our area on ESX servers. It works pretty
well. We finally got everything for #3 finished a few weeks ago, so it's
only run once, at the first of next month we will see how it goes again.
--
Robert LeBlanc
Life Sciences Computer Support
Brigham Young University
leblanc AT byu DOT edu
(801)422-1882
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