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VictorRuiz's avatar
VictorRuiz
Level 2
13 years ago

Backup vSphere virtual machines without snapshot

Hello everybody,

I have a environment with backup exec 2010 R3 and vSphere 4.1. I have the backupexec agent installed on the Vcenter server.

I have a virtual machine with a large disk (2 TB) and I want to backup the virtual machine to tape without do a snapshot. vSphere requires a large disk to perform the snapshot and it fails whe I run the backup from BackupExec. Is there any way to perform a backup witouh do the snapshot? The virtual machine is off and I don't need to do the snapshot, only want to copy the files from the ESX server to the tape. How can I do it?

Thanks in advance

 

Agent for VMware Virtual Infrastructure
Backing Up
Backup and Recovery
Backup Exec
VMware

6 Replies

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  • ZeRoC00L's avatar
    ZeRoC00L
    Level 6
    13 years ago

    The only way will be a traditional agent backup. Offcourse this is not possible when the server is turned off.

  • Sush---'s avatar
    Sush---
    Level 6
    13 years ago

    Backup Exec uses Vstorage API to take the backups of VMs and as VStorage API will take a snapshot of the VM then only it will be able to backup.

    What you are asking is probably out of scope of BE.

    But as you said that you just need the VHD files on tapes, then what you can try is somehow copy the VHD files on local hard disk and then take a backup of those copied VHD files to tape. But remember during restore this will NOT be restored as VM but just a flat file and then you will have to export it to the ESX.

     

    Thanks,

    -Sush...

  • VictorRuiz's avatar
    VictorRuiz
    Level 2
    13 years ago

    Thank you for your replies.

    Then, is there any agent that I can install on the ESXi server? or maybe the only solution is copying manually (or with any script like ghettobackup)  to another location where I can backup the file system?

     

  • Sush---'s avatar
    Sush---
    Level 6
    13 years ago

    No. There is no any supported agent that can be installed on the ESX server and used for backups.

     

    Thanks,

    -Sush...

  • VictorRuiz's avatar
    VictorRuiz
    Level 2
    13 years ago

    Ok! thank you for your replies. I will try to find another way to do the backup...

     

    Regards