Well.. the main thing i dont like about the consolidated backup is the fact that the VMFS partitions are exposed to a windows host (albeit as an unknown filesystem). This means that an adminstrator could theoretically right click on a VMFS Lun and click delete... and guess what.. the VMFS would go.

Also, I dont like the fact that there is no restore functionality at the moment... so you can backup, but you need another program to restore.. go figure.

I actually quite like the way CB works.. and when these little niggles are sorted it will be an awesome program.. but for now I would prefer to use something like ESXRanger...

Neil

Hey... another Kiwi here, _base_d in Auckland and running most of the company I work for's servers on VMware ESX (~35 servers). We have been starting to get into fun stuff with SAN flashcopies of vmfs partitions and also a few manky perl _script_s (I'm sure everyone has some hiding away). We have also been doing a bit with VMware server on linux as a lab environment, which is working really well.

Hoping to play with VI 3 at some point, but haven't had the time as yet.

Hi simonh and welcome to the site!

Good to hear from another virtualisation user, how does the flashcopy stuff work for you ? A mate of myn is doing it an he said it works well.

I am planning on reviewing some third party utils that do this stuff and putting it on the site. Just waiting for vendors to get back to me.

What sort of perl _script_s are you running, what do they do ?

SimonH, you dont happen to work for the AA do you ?

No No.. not the AA, I work in at Lumley Insurance.

Perl _script_ wise... just a modified version of vmsnap.pl, and playing around with some ideas on letting developers create/destroy/commit redo logs on their own development guests (via a web interface or similar). Initial flashcopy tests that I did worked nicely, i'm just waiting on an order for more SAN at the moment before I do anything more special with it.

Hi folks.

I work at a largish site in Auckland (200 odd vm's over 17 physical servers).

Interesting to see the discussion regarding backups... we don't really have a specific backup strategy per se - our VM hosts still back themselves up via TSM, which isn't really ideal, but we haven't come up with a better method yet. The majority of our VM's are clustered services hence losing one isn't a real biggie - just clone one of the remaining cluster members and start it up.

We run tsm on the esx boxes as well, but there's not exactly a whole lot of data to be backed up that isn't on the vmfs partitions and in use.