Free way remote backup Windows Server 2003 VM or VMware files

[jimvman]

Hello again everybody,

I was hoping to get a bit more insight into backing up a single VM on an ESXi 4.0 server to an offsite Linux server.  I currently do most of my Linux backups with rsync but in this case there is an ESXi server and the Windows 2003 Server VM that I need backed up.  The site location only has a 3Mbps up/down connection too.  The windows server is around 200GB in total size.

I was trying to determine if I should just backup from the Windows Server directly to my offsite server, or should I backup the VM files (from VMware)?  Any ideas on how to do this?  Will it be possibly to do this with open-source tools without any cost?  I think backup of the VM files and rsyncing those would be too bandwidth intensive for the amount of bandwith I have available at that location.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Jim

[ch1ta]

You can utilize Veeam Backup and Replication Free version, with its VeeamZIP built-in functionality.

VeeamZIP is similar to full VM backup. Nevertheless, when you perform backup with VeeamZIP, there is no need to configure a backup job and schedule it; instead, the backup process for selected VMs can be started immediately.

Once the job is finished, you’ll have the highly de-duped and compressed VM on one (*.vbk) file, which afterwards can be easily sent to Linux machine.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.