Use VMa to do Guest Backups

[bklynjae]

Has anyone had any luck using a VMa to backup guests, and how did you do it.?

Ive heard there was a way to do it using scripts.

Thankx,

[William Lam]

vMA does not provide any utilities nor is it meant to do backups, here is an article on what vMA is: http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/p/vmware-vma-vima.html

If you've read the above article, you'll realize that vMA is a VMware management appliance that has some CLI utilities that can be used to develop a backup solution using the vSphere API. One such script is which leverages the vSphere API to perform backups of VMs, please refer to the documentation for more details and ensure that you are NOT using the free licensed version of ESXi as that is not suppported with the script.

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William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware scripts and resources at:

Twitter: @lamw

Getting Started with the vMA (tips/tricks)

Getting Started with the vSphere SDK for Perl

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

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If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

[bklynjae]

Awesome, no this is a rather large environement and we have the enterprise licensing. Let me look into this and get back to you when I figure it out.

Now one other question and im probably getting ahead of myself. But would I be able to attach a 1-2 tb lun to the vma and uise it as the backup destination?

[William Lam]

No, vMA is not directly part of the backup process. The backup datastore will need to be mounted against the hosts in which they'll back up to.

If you're looking for an appliance in which you can attach storage to backup to, take a look at VMware vDR (Data Recovery). This appliance does exactly what you're looking for and supports both RDM/VMDK or CIFS.

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware scripts and resources at:

Twitter: @lamw

Getting Started with the vMA (tips/tricks)

Getting Started with the vSphere SDK for Perl

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

VMware Developer Community

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

[bklynjae]

I setup the vma and the script. I run the script and get:

ESXiHostname]$ ./ghettoVCB.sh -a -l /tmp/ghettovcb.log

Logging output to "/tmp/ghettovcb.log" ...

ERROR: Unable to locate vimsh! You're not running ESX(i) 3.5+ or 4.0+!

What am I missing..??

[FroStar]

reply moved to its own thread