ESXi backup

[chbayet]

hi,

I am trying the trial version of veeam backup.
Does veeam backup support the backup of running VM on ESXi?
Does the "tool quiescence" feature work with ESXi and guaranties a consistent backup?

Thanks

Christian

[Gostev]

Hello Christian,

Yes Veeam Backup is primarily designed to perform "hot" backups of running VMs on all types of ESX/ESXi servers.

To achieve consistent backups and replicas, Veeam Backup provides proprietary implementation of VSS integration which is superior than regular "Vmware tools quiescence" because it implements application-level quiescensce with application-specific restore steps, and supports application-level quiescensce on Windows 2008. We have a white paper talking about this in more details available for download from Veeam Backup product page.

Hope this helps.

[jessie0]

Hello Gostev,

I know so far that ESXi hosts can be backed up and restored with VB&R.
A search for any document regarding my question was fruitless but permit to ask anyway.
Is it possible to backup the ESXi server itself (not the hosts) with VB&R?
If possible, please point me to documents describing the procedure.

Thank you.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Jessie.
To be on the same track with naming convention - in Veeam we call "Hosts" physical Esxi servers with hypervisor installed. "Guests" are virtual servers(VMs) running on the virtualization Host.

Generally there is no need to backup esxi host configuration, as it is (almost to) never used during restore procedures. It takes few minutes to spin up fresh esxi on bare metal and join it a cluster where Host Profiles will be applied with all required configuration settings.
If you really need to have host configuration backup for whatever reason, VMware has various scripting ways to do so, from vsphere CLI up to PowerCLI.
/Thanks!