Backup Solution

[David Robillard]

> 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