VMWARE ESX Host Backups: Easy and Free

I don't if anybody remembers, but about a year ago, one of our really cool Dell servers decided to go belly up.  Now mind you it was our *most* redundant server.  The raid card blipped out and wrote bad data across 2 disks of our raid 5 array, thus destroying the array.  We were pretty good about backups, but the bad news was that this array contained all of our VM Hosts.  Now the data for each host was safe because we did per VM backups of exchange, databases, etc....but the fact remained that we just lost 8 VM's all of which would have to be rebuilt by hand, and then restore the data to each of them.

Not the end of the world, but the next 36 hours were full of caffeine and very painful.

Introducing ESXpress.  This software has revolutionized the way we backup our ESX server.  It automatically backs up each VM Full Host every night.  We do a full backup of the Host on Thursdays and it does block level Delta's the other nights of the week.  We have the system configured to compress and backup to our live backup server using FTP.  Basically it requires very little room on the ESX Server and it finishes our backups very quickly at night.

THE BEST part is, it can be installed and configured in about 10 minutes, and you don't need a VMWARE degree to get it done.  All you need to do is visit their site and download the package.  They have an 8 minute video that will walk you through the entire installation.  The only other thing needed is a place to dump the backups.  I tried some of the options, but we opted to install an FTP server on our Backup box and then it was easy as pie.  Configure EsXpress to dump to that FTP Server, and wait for results.

WARNING: Make sure you keep track of how much disk space this uses.  In the FREE mode the system doesn't automatically clean up old backups.  If you buy the basic LE license you get the added feature of it cleaning up the backup folder...Very nice, very worth the money.  They offer a 15% discount for Non-Profits.  This means the basic LE license is around $425.00.  I will tell you we have run the free version for about 6 months with no problems, but we are going to purchase the Pro Version next week to take advantage of faster backups, and also to gain the advantage automated cleanups.

Sharepoint: Automated Backups using STSADM

During the recent IT Roundtable Podcast there was discussion about SharePoint and how to automate the backup process.

We are using WSS 3.0, not the full blown MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) software.

The following is my exact backup command (inside a batch file that is scheduled to run every night at 11:00pm):

c:

cd "\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN"

stsadm -o backup -directory \\ccm-gallery\ITBackup\ccm-sps\Sharepoint -backupmethod full

Basically this command does a full farm backup of your sharepoint environment into a subfolder. This will backup all necessary sharepoint databases / configurations / xml files ect that are need to recreate the sharepoint site.

WARNING: This will take care of everything inside of the Sharepoint WSS environment. If you customize anything outside of the environment (ie: create new master pages, implement FBA, or other alternative authentication schemes) - you will need to back these up seperately!

For safety sake, I run the STSADM commands automatically, then I also drop a full backup of the C:\InetPub folders.

When I restored my server recently, our intranet (plain vanilla WSS 3.0 Site with Windows Auth) restored in about 5 minutes after the server was rebuilt.

WARNING #2: The backup script I have proposed here creates a new subdirectory every time a backup takes place and drops the whole farm there. For us this is about 1.2 GB every time there is a backup. So make sure you keep that area fairly clean. We are doing backups to another server with 500Gb just for doing these kind of backups!

This command is just built into Sharepoint... Works great!