Backing up VMWare machines

[hope_springs]

Hi all,

I have a question regarding backing up of VMWare machines.

System:

Server (Domain Controller and Media server) VMware host, with three Vmware Server machines (domain members):

(1) Exchange Server 2003

(2) Terminal Server and Application Server

(3) Archiving server with Symantec Enterprise Vault and SQL Server 2000

Backup Exec 11d is installed on the Domain Controller VMWare host machine.

Question:

Ideally we would like to be able to perform online backups of the VMWare servers. We are currently looking at installing backup agents on each of the VMWare server machines and backup to tape on the Domain Controller host, but is there a better method, i.e.

(1) is there an agent available to perform online backups of VMWare machines?

(2) if we use the open file backup option to backup the VMWare files will this result in unstable VMware machines upon restore? Also, are VMWare 'snapshots' stored as closed files (i.e. can be backed up without having to close the VMWare machine).

Appreciate any comments or suggestions, thanks in advance!

[Joshua_Small]

Firstly, that's an awful lot to run on one piece of hardware. You would actually get mich better performance by moving at least Exchange to the host OS and just running it live.

That said, there is no VMware agent for Backup Exec.

Using the AOFO will not, in my experience, result in stable files for this kind of scenario.

It is possible to do a prejob command, running "vmx-cmd suspend" to pause the machine, do the backup (with AOFO, some files are still locked) and then "vmx-cmd resume" the server, but the suitability of this will depend on the file size, and whether you actually can afford a short outage.

[bjash]

 Using BE 12.5 along with VMWare Consolidated Backup, you can run VCBMounter to perform an image-level backup of the VMDK file and then have the BE job backup the directory where you put the image at.  This provides for a crash-consistent backup, but is a complete backup of the VM guest.