[THIN] Re: OT: VMWare backups

I use the cron and snapshot & Quiesce the VM, make an TSM (but you may choose any other certified backup solution) backup of the frozen VMDK, then the script executes its commit and the incremental changes are reappied to the vmdk. it works 100% of times . It worked for ESX 2.5.x but occasionally missed a backup, on VI3 it works 100% of times (for about 1.5 years). The only drawback is that my TSM client (backupclient) does not

allow to have more then one session on my host. My backups are sequential and have a certain hit on my host (as would any backup of a large file), I have not a clue about other soutions, This one works fine and is out-of-the-box

 

 

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From: thin-bounce@freelists.org [mailto:thin-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Matthew Shrewsbury
Sent: donderdag 4 december 2008 15:50
To: thin@freelists.org
Subject: [THIN] Re: OT: VMWare backups

I don’t know if this is a dead topic (just now had a chance to read the list) and I actually just went through this. I looked very carefully at vRanger and Veeam. I ran both products and found Veeam to be much more reliable (vRanger kept failing) and the Veeam product was cheaper, more capable (much faster file level restores) and much easier to use interface.

ESX 3.5 update 2 supports VSS with their VMware agent tools and can be executed from vRanger or Veeam. Another key difference between vRanger and Veeam is I schedule a shutdown of a VM and then backup it up for older databases that don’t support VSS. vRanger wouldn’t snap the VM so that it could then be started right back up. When using vRanger it locked the files and the VM would fail to start unless the backup was finished. Veeam created a snapshot and always backed up the snapshot if the VM was running or not. I did hear from vRanger (who had very good technical support) that version 4 is going to be released in Q1 ’08 will address most of the issues I had with their product.

 

 

Matthew Shrewsbury

Director of Information Technology

 

Coscan Homes, LLC

5555 Anglers Avenue, Suite 1

Fort Lauderdale, FL 33312

mshrewsbury@coscanhomes.com

www.coscanhomes.com

Phone: 954-558-0198

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From: thin-bounce@freelists.org [mailto:thin-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Steve Snyder
Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 11:39 PM
To: thin@freelists.org
Subject: [THIN] OT: VMWare backups

so how are ya'll backing up your virtuals?

Right now we're backing up each virtual at their OS level, looking a vRanger to do a back-end snapshot backup. Of course BUE 12.5 was just released which is supposed to support vmware (and hyper-v) too.