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Virtual Machines Hot Backup Scripts |
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Thursday, 16 February 2006
by Michel Roth
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Performing hot backups of virtual machines is a hot item. Until esx3 arrives with it's new solution to perform -fast- hot backups of your virtual machines, you're going to help yourself. One way to do hot backups of your virtual machines running on esx server is to use the VMDK script. VMBK is a perl script that allows you to create snapshots of hot esx virtual disks and save the back-up virtual disks locally, or to SMB or NFS mounts. There is plenty of documentation and examples on the VMTS Web site, and this should offer Hot Backup flexibility. With VMBK, you can back up all VMs on an ESX host, or just a select group of VMs. This of course doesn't provide you with the ability to do "custom" restores but it does allow you to perform backups of your virtual machines without powering down or suspending your virtual machines. Read more on VMBK here.
For those of you running Virtual Server 2005, there is no way to back up a hot VM without running a back-up agent inside the VM. Period. However, one alternative that you may consider would be to suspend the VM, back up its related files, and then resume the VM following the completion of the backup. Here's a script that does that for you.
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