Can this tool backup all VMs running on VMWare host?

LawcMnnn    Mar 23 6:58PM 2017

Does this tool allow for backups of all VMs running on a VMWare host?

Ideally I would like to backup all VMs running on my esxi VMWare host to another location without powering down the VM servers running. Do this in the background.

I think the demo is showing how to backup a single VM. I would like to back up all running vms on the server to another location (SFTP option).

Also what about the ESXi Host. Is there any backup of the host and configuration files?

Thanks!


gchen    Mar 23 7:22PM 2017

Yes, it can. If you don't pass a VM name to the backup command, it will back up all VMs on the host. You can also pass multiple VM names to select a few to back up, not all of them.

No, it doesn't back up the host and configuration files.


LawcMnnn    Mar 23 10:23PM 2017

If there is roughly 400 GB of data (VMs) on one of the DataStore Volumes how much space will the backup store need?

Do you know of any tools to backup the configuration for the host itself?


gchen    Mar 23 11:01PM 2017

That depends on two factors:

  • How much space on the disks inside your VMs has been used
  • The randomness of these data on those disks

For disks that are almost full of normal data, I would say maybe half of that is needed for the storage, since Vertical Backup compresses blocks before uploading them to the storage. But this is only an estimate.


LawcMnnn    Mar 23 11:23PM 2017

How much overhead will there be for the initial backup on the vmware host? Any issues with taking the backups while the host and vms are running?


gchen    Mar 24 11:17AM 2017

On my quad-core i7 ESXi host, the cpu utilization is between 20% and 25% when backing up a VM, so it is about one core for the backup job.

Our daily tests have been running without a single failure for more than a month. 3 runs a day, and 5 backups per run. This is the output from the latest run:

test              init   initial backup   second backup   list   check    restore     prune      time
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SFTP              pass     226.64MB/s      328.17MB/s     pass   pass    263.09MB/s    pass    00:04:36
SFTP encrypted    n/a      198.19MB/s      324.22MB/s     pass   pass    259.79MB/s    pass    00:05:00
S3                pass     42.26MB/s       293.17MB/s     pass   pass    263.72MB/s    pass    00:19:06


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