[NTLUG:Discuss] Backing up live VMWare VM's (on the cheap)

[Chris Cox]

David Simmons wrote:
> 
> Guys,
> 
> Was hoping to poll the group and see if anyone has a good
> solution for VMWare Virtual Machine Backups on live servers....without
> using Vmware's Consolidated Backup program (i.e. - doing it on the
> cheap).
> 
> Setup - running the free VMWare Server (not ESXi) on
> CentOS and have a duplicate machine waiting to receive the backup files
> (and be a new host if original host goes down).

Are these VM guests running databases or something that might
do exclusive locks, etc?  If not, we just rsync (like a normal machine)
our guests.  Won't work in less than 1/3 of 1/2 of 1/8 of 1% of
all scenarios.

You can put together an exclusion list to not backup things like
/proc and certain /dev areas and such.  I've got a list we use,
just not sitting in front of me at the moment.

Again, we use this for all of our hosts, including VM guests,
we take things to disk (because it's cheap) and then to tape
(which is a bit slower).  Rsync allows us to backup more than
a hundred hosts daily because we're just pulling the deltas...
we find rsync to be the fastest way to do backups.

Going from our d2d area to tape can take longer, but at
that point, it doesn't matter (time wise)... then the tapes
can go offsite.

Frankly, I wouldn't treat a VM guest any differently
than a normal *ix host... Oh... you say... it's not
*ix... well... I'd still use whatever you use for
whatever OS type it is (though Windows backups are
usually grossly inefficient).  We have done rsyncs to
our Windows machines though... it does work (not sure
about a tape restoration... data is there, just might
be more difficult than a *ix restore).

Just my opinion....

> 
> I think I can
> do something like this:
> 
> 1)  Run  'vmrun snapshot
> /path/to/vmx' 
> 2)  Copy all files (original and snapshot) from
> first server to storage area on second)
> 3)  Issue 'vmrun
> revertToSnapshot /path/to/vmx'   or 'vmrun deleteSnapshot
> /path/to/vmx'
> 4)  Sleep safely knowing things are backed-up
> 
> I'm pulling this mindset from:
> 
> http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid179_gci1276253,00.html
> 
> but I have the following questions:
> 
> A)  which
> option do I use with vmrun in step 3)
> B)  is this a good way
> (without using something like VCB) to do this?
> C)  Are there
> better methods (without having to suspend the running servers)?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
>  - dave