It is possible to backup VMs e.g. by shutting them down and copying them to local disk using data store browser, or by using a £250 plugin for Symantec Backup Exec 2010.
However, VMs are only half the data needed to recover from the vSphere server failing (e.g. if there is a disk crash).
Does anyone know how to backup the actual vSphere configuration, including:
- storage pools
- virtual switches
- virtual networking connections of the VMs themselves.
- resource pools
- etc.
Currently we are running vSphere 5 evaluation, but will switch to Essentials shortly.
We have the built in vSphere client only. vCenter has pre-requisits we dont have, such as windows domain controllers (we have an all UNIX DC), and as far as we can tell has no backup features, so we have not installed it.
There is a backup tool in the essentials plus, but this is 10x more expensive, out of our budget, and contains many features (such as vmotion) we dont need as we only have one host.
Does anyone have any tips or hacks to backup a vsphere server? Currently we have the server using all internally connected disks (raid 5), but we could do some tricks like iscsi mount the vsphere install partition using a spare partition on the SAN, and shutdown the vsphere server, and make a clone in the san? Do people do this kind of thing?