[Box Backup] Virtual Machine backup

[Dave Bamford]

Chris Wilson wrote:
> Hi Dave,
>
> On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, Dave Bamford wrote:
>
>> Has anyone on the list had experience using box to backup a virtual 
>> machine at the hypervisor level. There are some commercial products 
>> out there but all very expensive.
>>
>> I have a server running Vmware ESXi and am using a script 
>> ghettoVCB.sh to copy the vm to a NFS drive on another machine but 
>> ideally need to backup to offsite. The files in a VM are very big but 
>> I would guess they compress well.
>>
>> Ideally box should run at the hypervisor level but there are no tools 
>> to compile at this level. I can get ssh access and get to an ash 
>> shell. uname -a reports VMKernel.
>
> Box Backup is designed to compile in pretty minimal environments. You 
> may be able to cross-compile for the hypervisor environment by setting 
> "LDFLAGS=-static" at configure time when building on a machine with a 
> build environment where you can compile Box Backup normally.
>
> Cheers, Chris.
Hi Chris

Where would that go exactly, I am not an expert on building /compiling.
I'll give it a try.

I copied the files from a vmware esxi machine to another machine via NFS 
today
220Gb in total ( a virgin install of sbs 2003 ) and it tar gzipped to 
2.3Gb, of course
it only contained the OS and no user data.

All "bare Metal" backups solutions seem to cost in excess of $500. The 
big issue to me
is the delta blocking which box does well. But by taking a new snapshot 
each time
box will see this as a new file and back the whole thing up. Even with 
an uplink of
2M which you can get with ADSL2+ it will take too long.

Cheers Dave