Hello.
I’m fairly new to ESXi, so I pre-emptively apologize if this is a dumb question. I found only one similiar question on the forum with a single response.
I’m currently working with a small company that no IT staff and has a very simple VM setup / backup solution. They have a pair of physical file servers, each with VMware Server 1 installed. They have a single SBS 2003 VM that runs on the primary file server. Every night the virtual SBS Server shuts itself down and is copied to the backup file server. The copy is already registered on the second server – the files are just overwritten nightly. This way all they need to do if they have an issue on the primary physical server is log on to the backup server, start the VM and click the ‘I moved it’ dialog. This solution is simple enough for them to handle.
Their server hardware is getting replaced. They can choose either Windows Server 2008 or ESXi 5. I’d rather go with ESXi for them, but I need to be able to replicate their failover process so all they need to do is start the copy of their SBS server on the backup server if they have an issue with the primary server. I’m trying to find a free solution on ESXi that does this.
The solutions I’ve found so far:
Veeam Backup – the free version doesn’t support scheduling, and their download page says doesn’t the free version doesn’t support the free version of ESXi.
ghettoVCB - backs up to another datastore on the same host, not a different host. It can be scheduled, and it has experimental rsync support, but this also looks like it synchronizes with another local datastore.
ghettoClone – no longer works with the Free ESXi because of the read-only datastore changes?
Thinware vBackup – looks like the free version may support scheduled backups.
VMware Standalone Converter – has no scheduling features built in. The converter-cli seems to be able to take xml job files as an input, and may be an option.
Are any other community members using any of these tools to pre-emptively stand-up a backup copy of a VM (versus restoring at the time the VM is needed)?
Are there other/better solutions I’m missing here?
Could I simply log into the primary ESXi box and FTP/SCP the files to the secondary on a nightly basis?
Thank-you for any guidance you can provide!