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ESXi Backup


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Hello Guys,

 

Apologies in advance for the question, as i am a noob with virtualization.

 

I am working on a Disaster Recovery plan, and had some questions, as I am new to ESXi Virtualization.I have several Virtual machines running on my ESXi 6.0 Server, the ESXI OS is installed on the local hard disk, currently running on a raid 1. what would be the best way for me to backup the Hosts that i have running on the virtual machine. Here's an example of what i want to be able to accomplish: I have an ESXI server hosting a virtual windows 2012 machine. A storm hits and the machine is totaled. I want to have some sort of media that i can plug into a different ESXI server and have my windows 2012 server backup. is this possible at all.

 

Thanks in advance for any help!

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Preferably you would have an environment with high availability, backup generators, UPSs, and lots of surge protection everywhere.  Your disaster recovery plan will be determined based on what you have available to you.  Going on your scenario where a storm hits and everything is fried I think you need to be more concerned with protecting your hardware.  As long as the hardware that stores the VMs and runs them is safe then you're likely to not have a problem with the VMs themselves.  As far as backing up the VMs I would say you need to have a plan in place to back up the .vmdk for each VM on some form of offline media.  Doing that is a real pain when there are ways to automate backups to network storage but in your scenario all of the systems have been fried.

Getting away from the storm scenario you can add unforeseen circumstances to your plan.  For example, you might be concerned with the OS on the VM becoming corrupt or possibly hacked and destroyed.  For those systems you'll want to consider just backing up the data to some form of storage outside of the server and not even worry about the VM itself.  You can always create template VMs that have all of your software/settings/etc pre-configured so all you have to do is clone (if you have vCenter) or deploy from OVA (if you don't have vCenter).  Then you re-import your data and you're back in business.  A perfect example of what I'm talking about is a SQL server.  You can make a template VM with SQL installed and all of your settings configured on it.  Then on the production VM of SQL you make sure that you run scheduled backups of the databases to either network storage or separate (physical) drives attached to the server.  If your VM craps itself you simply clone/deploy your template and re-import your latest backup.

There's definitely a lot to consider when making a disaster recovery plan and each environment will require something different.

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You could install some backup software on the server 2012 VM itself to back it up. Is the virtual machine stored on the ESXi server itself? You might want to consider setting up some sort of network storage and have ESXi access it via iSCSI and then look at snapshotting the SAN/NAS.

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