A manual process, but it works well.įor creating full image backups of VMs running on free ESXi you need to enable ssh access on the host, because vBackup basically just copies the VM files through ssh to a local disk. When selecting it you are refered to the Admin Guide that explains how use the command line features of vBackup and the Windows Task Scheduler to create scheduled backup jobs. There is also a Scheduled Tasks view available, but it is without any function right now. You add your hosts and VMs to the Inventory view, create backup jobs for VMs and can manage existing backups in the Backups view. VBackup's GUI is clear and well structured. The vBackup Administrator's Guide is very clear about this and also provides a download link to the recommended version 5.1 of the VDDK. The software is easy to install, but has a prerequisite that you must install manually before: The VMware VDDK (Virtual Disk Development Kit). The product page explains what features are available in what editions. You can also already request a free license key for the Standard version or purchase licenses for the paid Advanced and Professional versions. It requires a license key: Right now a beta license key (that unlocks all editions) is available for free, but that expires on May 31st. Thinware's vBackup has been in beta for more than four years(!) now, but recently its version number jumped up from 0.3.2 to 4.0 and the end of the beta phase was announced for May 31st 2014. For this comparison I will focus on the free versions. Both are available in a free version and in one or two paid versions. So I will look at and compare two other products: Thinware vBackup and Trilead VM Explorer. But its current version does no longer work with free ESXi, because Veeam now focuses on the modern features (VADP and CBT) mentioned above that are not available with the free license. its former standalone version VeeamZip) was the de-facto standard for backing up VMs on free ESXi. In the past Veeam's free edition of their flagship product Backup & Replication (resp. GhettoVCB does not offer that, so let's look at alternatives that run on the most wanted and most hated operating system: Windows. I could stop now and ignore the voices of all the admins out there that want simple-to-use GUI tools to do their tasks - one graphical interface to create and manage backup jobs, maintain VM and backup inventories etc. GhettoVCB is available on Github, it's well documented and has great community support. It is a script that runs inside an ESXi shell and is able to utilize VMware snapshots to back up even running VMs by cloning them to a secondary location (e.g. The first option that I must mention here is William Lam's awesome GhettoVCB script. And best of all these are available for free themselves. Nevertheless there are several solutions available to back up VMs running on free ESXi. but unfortunately with the free ESXi license VMware has disabled some functionality that is important for efficient backups of VMs: VADP ( vStorage APIs for Data Protection) and CBT ( Changed Block Tracking) are the features that all modern software products for VM backups make use of. As soon as you have some sort of "production" workload running in VMs you will start thinking about how to protect them from data loss. But this doesn't work.VMware ESXi with the free license (also known as vSphere Hypervisor) is a great way to get started with server virtualization and run your own hypervisor at home or in small environments. I've even tried downloading the full software again, from file connect, by entering the serial number on the certificate, and downloading the software fromt he list, which should be the correct software for that serial number. I've read through the Symantec KB, but most of their articles just suggest checking the license key is entered correctly (obviously), and not copying & pasting from an email, in case of whitespace. However, when I click Add it pops up with an error saying "An Invalid license key has been entered. I enter the key that got email to us after we registered the BackupExec serial number, that was on the certificate in the box, through the Symantec website (this is the same license key used to install the basic BackupExec componants). Now however, we've decided to use the built-in Exchange server, so I've tried to install the CPS agent, but during the setup screen, it asks for the license key. Although we were running Windows 2003 Small Business Edition, at the time we weren't using the Exchange side of it, as we had online hosted mail, so we only installed the basic BackupExec software, and not the CPS stuff. About 2 years ago we purchased BackupExec 11d Small Business Edition, which includes SharePoint, SQL & Exchange backup agents, and Continious Protection Server.
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