ESXi/VM backup help

[LIGISTX]

As seen in my sig, I have a home lab with ESXi as my hyper visor and some vm’s under it. My main storage is under virtualized freenas and consists of 10 4TB reds, no iscsi set up as the overhead involved would likely outrun my modest i3 and 28GB of RAM...

 

I am looking for a “simple” way to backup my VM’s. They are all either Ubuntu or centOS, and really only the Ubuntu ones “matter”. As far as I know, I can’t pop my second SSD in and allow ESXi to “software RAID 1” across both SSD’s, and since ESXi isn’t really an OS, I can’t host storage of my second SSD for my Ubuntu VM’s to backup to either. So at this stage I’m unsure how to even access the drive once I find a suitable backup solution. I suppose I could plug it into my HBA and thus freenas, set it up as it’s own pool and let the VM’s backup to that over the virtual network connection, I run a windows network so currently I have smb set up, but I could set up NFS for this if that would be more performant.

 

I have heard the free version of veeam could work for me, but I haven’t gone down that road yet as I am not even sure how to best host storage for the VM’s to backup to. The freenas idea to me seems less optimal since I would be backing up freenas itself (I wouldn’t actually, since that’s just an xml upload of settings) to a drive hosted under it. Basically, if things start taking a shit, I would need freenas to be operational just to recover. Theoretically, this shouldn’t be hard... freenas is pretty resilient, and worst case I could boot up a freenas instance on my testbench, upload the xml and plug in my “VM’s backup ssd” and somehow start recovering VM’s, somehow.

 

As you can tell, I know enough to know I don’t know what to do... crappy place to be. Any help would be fantastic!!

[DeaconFrost]

If you are like me and have the free version of the ESXI license, Veeam isn't going to be very useful.  Veeam requires the paid version of ESXi.  I believe there are other tools out there, but all come with various limitations if you don't have a paid license.

[Jarsky]

If you want VM level backup in VMware you need the vStorage API. 

You either need vSphere Essentials which is ~$500 

Or you need vCenter Standard which is ~$200/year as a VMUG subscription. 

 

Otherwise you either need to go to a different hypervisor, or use Guest Agent backup solutions

[LIGISTX]

6 hours ago, DeaconFrost said:

If you are like me and have the free version of the ESXI license, Veeam isn't going to be very useful.  Veeam requires the paid version of ESXi.  I believe there are other tools out there, but all come with various limitations if you don't have a paid license.

 

2 hours ago, Jarsky said:

If you want VM level backup in VMware you need the vStorage API. 

You either need vSphere Essentials which is ~$500 

Or you need vCenter Standard which is ~$200/year as a VMUG subscription. 

 

Otherwise you either need to go to a different hypervisor, or use Guest Agent backup solutions

I do actually have a version capable of such backup solutions, I am just a phat noob and am unsure how to go about this.

 

what is the vStorage API and what doe sir provide?

[Jarsky]

5 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

what is the vStorage API and what doe sir provide?

https://searchvmware.techtarget.com/definition/vStorage-API

Quote

A vStorage API is an application program interface (API) from VMware that enables third-party storage and backup vendors to integrate their products with VMware’s vSphere server virtualization platform.

 

It is unlocked with vSphere Essentials or vSphere Standard (vCenter)

[LIGISTX]

9 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

https://searchvmware.techtarget.com/definition/vStorage-API

 

It is unlocked with vSphere Essentials or vSphere Standard (vCenter)

 

10 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

https://searchvmware.techtarget.com/definition/vStorage-API

 

It is unlocked with vSphere Essentials or vSphere Standard (vCenter)

Ok, I am still unsure how I go about use it. I assume veeam is the program of choice, but I still don’t understand how I would set it up. Can VMware manage my backup SSD on its own? I wouldn’t be able to pass through the ssd to another guest OS, Ubuntu, veeam, or otherwise. I am just not sure how any of this works...

[Jarsky]

10 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

 

Ok, I am still unsure how I go about use it. I assume veeam is the program of choice, but I still don’t understand how I would set it up. Can VMware manage my backup SSD on its own? I wouldn’t be able to pass through the ssd to another guest OS, Ubuntu, veeam, or otherwise. I am just not sure how any of this works...

 

You have to setup a backup server for running Veeam. https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/overview.html

You then configure veeam to authenticate to your ESXi host (you normally create a new role and service account for it), configure your backup schedule and to do VM backups and it will use the API to take snapshots or quiesce VM's where needed and create the VM backups. 

[BloodKnight7]

You got some options.... Have you tried:

 

https://www.thinware.net/Products/ThinwarevBackup/tabid/202/Default.aspx

https://www.vsquarebackup.com/

https://www.trilead.com/download/

or if you like some light command line work:

ghettoVCB by William Lam

ghettoVCB is a long known backup solution that works from ESXi 3.5 until ESXi 6, created by VMware employee William Lam. It's a comprehensive script that runs on the ESXi host and creates backups using the method explained above. It does not use the VMware backup API, so it works with free ESXi.

Download ghettoVCB from GitHub (Press "Raw" to download the File) and install the .vib:

esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/vghetto-ghettoVCB.vib -f

ghettoVCB can be configured with configuration files. A full documentation can be found here: ghettoVCB Documentation. For this example, I've created a basic configuration and only changed the backup volume:

VM_BACKUP_VOLUME=/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/BACKUP

Start the Backup with the -a parameter, to backup all VMs on the host, and the ghettoVCB.conf:

/opt/ghettovcb/bin/ghettoVCB.sh -a -g ghettoVCB.conf

This will create a backup of all Virtual Machines running on the ESXi host to the backup directory. To restore, you can simply add the .vmx file to the ESXi inventroy.

Pro/Cons
+ Available as VIB package, easy installation
+ Mature solution with a large feature set
+ Good documentation. Easy to make cronjobs that are persistent through a reboot.
- Due to it's large feature set, the deployment is not self-explaining
- Requires basic shell skills