Hi everyone,
I have searched the forms and looked at documentation on how to backup a VMware server but still can not really figure it out... i am sorry if there is a proper post out there answering my question... i am a newb with all this VMware stuff so please bare with me...
our current network setup we have 1 Host/base machine Running Windows Server 2003 Standard and have 3 Virtual Guest machines. 1 of them is a W2k3 SBS machine the other one is a w2k machine and the last one is a Xp machine.
The C:\ drive has 70 GB and the D:\ which is running all of this virtual machines has 150GB
I have an E:\ drive that is free and is 300 GIG that i want to do the backups to and also a G:\ drive which is a 300 GIG USB 2.0 that I would also like to do backups to....
My question is how can i automatically down/suspend the virtual servers for as much short period as possible, make a volume shadow copy (since im running w2ke on the base machine) and after the shadow copy is created, make the server either turn back on or unpause itself. after this backup the volume shadow copy to my 300 GIG drive.
I dont have any backup software other than NTBackup.
I want this to be done automatically...
right now i manually turn off the virtual server, and backup the entire virtual disk to my 300GB drive.
If I take a volume shadow copy of the drive im not sure where it saves the file for me to backup manually thus i revert to backing up the entire file...
as mentioned above i want to be able to automatically backup the virtual servers and if possible do a full backup on Friday Night and from monday - thursday only do incremental backups... if this is not possible its ok i will backup the entire virtual disk....
the size of my w2k3-sbs server is around 70gigs and the size of my w2k server is 15gigs... the xp is only 5gigs...
when i manually backup the entire virtual disk without doing a shadow copy - the copy to my 300GB disk takes sometime and in that time my server is off so e-mails get bounced and so forth.... i dont mind if the server is down for 10minutes or so...
can someone please help me out... i stay up late at night doing these manual backups of these servers and its starting to kill me!
i just want to be able to backup my virtual guest systems automatically the quickets/fastest way and not have my guest systems down for too long of a time....
again i apologize if there is somthing like this already posted but i could not find it... and again i am a newb so please go easy on me!
thanks in advance for your help!