How to setup a daily backup virtual machine running on VMWare

backupvmware-server

My company has a VMWare server. We run 6-8 virtual machine. I would like to perform daily backup them in a storage server.

How to do this with VMWare? Is there some "component" I don't know ? Or simply, I need to 'physical' copy vmdk files with a simple Bash script ?

Best Answer

It's not a simple bash script by any stretch of the imagination but I've used this excellent script written by Iamw before and it's worked like a charm. We had a 2GB Netgear NAS attached to the network and added as an NFS Datastore:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8760

This script performs backups of virtual machines residing on ESX(i) 3.5/4.x+/5.x servers using methodology similar to VMware's VCB tool. The script takes snapshots of live running virtual machines, backs up the master VMDK(s) and then upon completion, deletes the snapshot until the next backup. The only caveat is that it utilizes resources available to the Service Console of the ESX server or Busybox Console (Tech Support Mode) of the ESXi server running the backups as opposed to following the traditional method of offloading virtual machine backups through a VCB proxy.

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Virtual machine image compatibility between VMware Server and VMware Player

What is important for vmWare products is the hardware version of the virtual machine. You can obtain that version if you look in the compatibility options in settings on many vmWare products. Also see the link for a list of products and hardware versions they support.

vmWare hardware versions

Postgresql daily backup

Since my databases are fairly small I "cheat" and use logrotate to do my postgresql-backups. Something like this in /etc/logrotate.d/postgresql-backup :

/var/backups/postgresql-dump.sql {
        daily
        nomissingok
        rotate 30
        compress
        delaycompress
        ifempty
        create 640 root adm
        dateext
        postrotate
                /usr/bin/sudo -u postgres /usr/bin/pg_dumpall --clean > /var/backups/postgresql-dump.sql
        endscript
}

This gives me a conveniently available complete dump, no more than a day old, and automatically compresses and rotates previous dumps.

Obviously this won't scale with larger databases, but for my purpose it's just about perfect. (I also use BackupPC to handle off-site backups which include the local postgresql-backups)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Virtual machine image compatibility between VMware Server and VMware Player

Postgresql daily backup

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