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I have a Vmware infrastructure where I am using the free version of Esxi 5 . I cannot as a result use vmotion and the other cool features that come with a paid ESXI. I am using snapshots for the backups but they are stored on local hard drive. I need a better backup scenario where I can recover in the event of a harddrive failure. I tried openfiler but could not get it right. What backup method can I try given my situation?

Dan
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Marlin
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    Are your hard drives in a RAID arrangement on server-class hardware? – ewwhite Sep 06 '12 at 08:56
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    Snapshots are not backups! Please read [this](http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1025279)! – Aaron Copley Sep 06 '12 at 12:58

6 Answers6

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If you'd bought even one licence worth of 'Essentials Plus' (the second cheapest type) you'd be entitled to use VMWare's VDR backup appliance (soon to be replaced by the much better VDP) but you could also look at GhettoVCB which is at least free.

Chopper3
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    GhettoVCB works marvelously. We bought cheap cloud storage and we perform bi-weekly (2 times a month) uploads of a 7zip-compressed backup from GhettoVCB for offsite backup on even weeks. On odd weeks we retire a physical medium with another backup. At any given time we have a local backup on a NAS in the same structure, an off-line backup in a different area of the same city and an online copy on another continent. It works for us and it's very cheap. The only thing i had to figure out was how to track backups, duplicity helped. – ItsGC Sep 06 '12 at 09:00
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Snapshots are no backups. If you lose the main VMDK a snapshot refers to, the snapshot will be totally useless.

Why are snapshots considered as temporary backups not real backups?

Community
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Massimo
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Veeem backup does not support free versions of esxi http://www.veeam.com/blog/veeam-and-free-esxi.html. The GhettoVCB looks interesting and I suggest Marlin researches on it. I saw the link has a detailed way of implementing the GhettoVCB backup solution.

Paddington
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You can try to use Veeam Backup. Detailed information you can find here.

tasmanian_devil
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As an aside, depending on your infrastructure there's nothing to stop you from simply backing up your machines as though they were physical servers.

I.e., you could just use Symantec Backup Exec, DPM or whatever else.

I'm not saying this is necessarily preferred or anything, but it may be the most supportable option for you.

Dan
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You can try XSIBackup, it is a shared source solution. It makes scheduled hot backups via cron, SMART info, e-mail report, it has its own crontab and lets you make a diff mirror to a second ESXi box. For ESXi 5.1 and above only. http://33hops.com/xsibackup-vmware-esxi-backup.html

Daniel J.
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