Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 10:12:10 -0400 From: "David Robillard" <david.robillard@gmail.com> To: "Terry Sposato" <terry@sucked-in.com> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Backup Solution Message-ID: <226ae0c60709270712h3f862342t65da549364a4f3d5@mail.gmail.com>
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> I am relatively new to the FreeBSD game and have a bit of a problem which I > am not sure how to tackle. I recently build a server running VMWare ESX > Server 3 which will eventually run 6-7 small production VM's. These Virtual > Machines obviously have the need for backups and it poses quite a problem > for me unless I connect 6-7 external tape drives and give each VM it's own > tape device. I have looked into a few solutions using VM products > (consolidated backup) but it can only be done if you utilise a SAN. > > The server is running RAID 5 with around 700GB of space. Each VM may take up > to 50GB and backups might be around 15-20GB per VM. The machine itself has > an internal LTO3 tape drive, has anyone come across this kind of situation > before, and if so what would be a good way to backup each VM? It is easy > enough to backup the image files from the host machine but I need file level > backups within each VM also. > > I will be very grateful for suggestions or ways people have tackled this > kind of problem in a production environment. We use rdiff-backup to perform incremental backups of VMWare machine files. It works very well. Check it out at http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/ Let me know if you need help on the setup. On the other hand, if you prefer to backup the VMWare machines as if they were physical ones, then I suggest rsnapshot. Of course, this will only work with UNIX VMs. More info here http://www.rsnapshot.org/ Have fun, David -- David Robillard UNIX systems administrator & Oracle DBA CISSP, RHCE & Sun Certified Security Administrator Montreal: +1 514 966 0122
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