[Discuss] Manual or third-party ESX(i) backup?

[Richard Pieri]

On 10/31/2014 1:22 PM, Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> If we manually preserved, and lost the VM or the server, and rebuilt
> with original media, could we simply copy the manually preserved
> copies back over and be operational again, or are the add-on options
> the only way to make this happen?

The former. Maybe.

The problem is that a live VM means a dirty file system. It doesn't 
matter who's tools you use: copying disk images of running VMs is not a 
reliable backup.

The smartest thing to do is don't store production data inside VMs. 
Production data goes on real storage with real snapshot and backup 
capabilities. Mount data volumes in VMs over iSCSI, NFS, AFS, SMB, AFP, 
whatever displaces your battleship's weight in water. Backups and 
restores of production data are performed on the storage server. 
Operating systems run from copies of master images. Restoring a faulted 
VM entails copying a configured master image and restarting. Anything 
that might need routine backups from the running OS images should be 
handled from within the running guests.

-- 
Rich P.