If you’re interested in the vmware-server backup script, it’s been updated to include suggestions from you guys. Can see it here.

LB

[Updated 08-30-2007: script updated to fix a typo where the deletion of files after x days wasn’t functioning. The single quotes should have been double quotes. . .apologies folks. -LB]

[Updated 08-10-2007: script updated based on feedback. Now allows for exemptions via the EXEMPTION_ARRAY and will create the backup directories if they’re not there. Also put in a little more documentation -LB]

Ok, I do love VMWare, an absolutely terrific series of products. They solve so many problems, and do it with ne’er a hiccup in my experience. However, this particular post is about a problem, and its solution.

For those that haven’t been keeping up, not so long ago VMWare took their GSX (low-end server) product, relabeled it vmware-server and released it for free (not open source, just freeware). It’s truly a great product, it allows you to create and run VMs in a server environment. It’s not particularly crippled, and that I can recall, I’ve had zero downtime related to vmware-server. If you’re running on the cheap, don’t want to mess with Xen, Microsoft Virtual Server, etc. this is the way that I would recommend going.

However, you notice that I qualified crippled up there. Backing up a vmware-server virtual machine without bringing it down is impossible (at least without a third party product). That being the case, the goal is to minimize your downtime while maximizing the viability of your backup.

With this criteria in place, you do not want to back up the live data. The vmware-server disk images are quite active, and if you were to just copy them live, you would certainly end up with, at best, corrupted data, and at the worst, a completely fubar’d disk image. Either way, it’s most likely a useless backup. So, that means that we need to find a way to back up the disk image while it is not actively in use.

Click “Read More” to see a few options, and the bash script created to solve this issue.

Read more