Programming in a small software company

Configuring vSphere 4.1 Backups

November 26th, 2010

Over the holiday, I finished the big office reorganization.

VMware ESX (vSphere) 4.1 has operated nicely on the new Dell Server.  The search for useable ESX Backup software is not going that well.

Veeam Backup

I started with Veeam.  I’ve used their fastSCP tool, and decided to try their backup software first.

Getting a price quote is next to impossible.  I emailed them 3 times, and even after calling them and being assured I would have a quote – nothing.

Installing Veeam on my spare server went smoothly.  The first backup went well, then I wanted to test the speed of the nightly backup.  That failed with a strange network error.  The next several tries also failed, even when I rebooted.

Their support department was fairly quick to respond to my request, but did not have any good solutions for the error I was seeing.

I moved the software to run on my backup server, that way there would not be any network issues.  My backup server hosts a 12TB disk array, and that is all it does.  However, it exports shares via SMB and NFS (using the Windows NFS Server).  Veeam grabs UDP port 111, which prevents the Microsoft NFS Server from running.  So, if you want to run Veeam on a system that exports NFS shares, you are out of luck.

Veeam support said that they need the port for their own internal NFS Server – so I can’t host NFS Shares on the same system that Veeam is installed on.

That’s aggravating, but not a deal killer.  I was using the NFS share for a different backup solution (ghettoVCB).

Anyway, I’m about 20 hours into my first backup and only 61% complete.  I have a feeling that my backup server doesn’t have the horsepower to run Veeam.

In any case, I’ll run the incremental backup using the block-change detection and see how long that takes.  I’m hoping it’ll be useable.

ghettoVCB

ghettoVCB is a free script that uses the ESX host to backup VM’s to a different datastore.  Because you may mount a NFS share as a datastore, you have a great deal of flexibility.

It operates by taking a snapshot of the VM, then cloning the base disk, then rolling back the snapshot.  So, you can backup running VM’s without any problems.

Configuration and setup is very easy; just edit the script.

Running it is also easy, and it’s fast.

This is my fallback solution.  I really want to get a “professional” backup solution that uses the block-change API.

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