I am new to VMWare so sorry if this is a silly question but has anyone come up with a reasonable strategy to backing up VM Hard drives while VMWare Server (the free one) product is running? I mean backing up entire hard drives from host os point of view, not the filesystems of the guest?
The way I figure is that backing up straight vmdk files would result in corruption as the files are too big and are being written to, but I was wondering if maybe there is a way to leverage vmware snapshot abilities (how exactly does that work? it seems to start a new file every time I take a snapshot, can I backup previous files as a stable entitiy) or maybe tap into journaling capabilities of the host OS (force all update entries to go to journal while backup takes place and catch up after backup is complete?)
I did some searching and all the info out there seems to deal with the ESX servers or with the guest OS - is there any way to do this with a free product?
Thanks
-HH