How can I backup an ESXi Datastore with ISOs and Templates, using NBU 7.x

[marcgl]

Both of these environments are up and functional 

Test Environment #1 

Master/Media Server - 
Windows 2008
NBU 7.1

vCenter 4.0
ESXi 4.1
ESXi 5.1

Test Environment #2 

Master/Media Server - 
Windows 2008
NBU 7.5.0.3

vCenter 4.0
ESXi 4.1
ESXi 5.1

The above environments are in an isolated lab, that we consistly flush and recreate to be as close as possible production environments to test performance. Therefore we have several ISOs and templates on a Datastore that we constantly use to build the environments, this totals over 500Gigs of data. Which can take over a week to repopulate the data manually, we would like to backup the LUN using NBU 7.x to disk and tape. Making it much easier to restore the LUN if it gets destroyed.

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

[Douglas_A]

Hi Marc,

The onlyt way i can think do get that done is to mount the LUN on another Linux Host and back it up from the mount.

It would have to be linux i think for it to work, but today there is no way to directly backup a DS by itself through VMWare.

[Mark_Solutions]

Not sure on ISO's but you can backup Templates using a VmWare backup policy (or Flashbackup-Windows) as long as the transport type is LAN

Hope this helps

[marcgl]

Thanks Douglas_A

I kind of figured, I've been researching it for a while. The older versions of NBU allowed users to take a back of the datastores. 

I think I'll try building a Linux Host and backing it up this way.

Thanks
Marc