Hi Andrew: I don't think for your purposes it matters which image format you choose, but for simplicity I'd choose the workstation format image. That'll probably be the easiest to restore to ESX should the need arise. I'm surprised you have VCB. Did that come with your starter edition or did your company purchase that separately? I didn't think VCB came with starter edition, I'll get to why in a minute. The short answer is yes, in theory, you can do what you want, but you might need either shared storage or a willingness to spend some quality commandline time to make it work. Long answer, VCB has an element that is installed on a Windows server that interfaces with your traditional backup product. It pulls the VMs you want to back up off of shared storage, compresses them, then sends a message off to your backup software to start the backup. I don't think this will work with your NAS, it wants a SAN of some kind, either fyber channel or ISCSI. Perhaps this has changed since we purchased our ESX server, but when we bought ESX, starter edition was specifically not allowed to use SAN shared storage to store VMs, so 99% of VCB's features would be useless to you. There is a commandline interface to VCB you can run on the ESX server, it's a little kloogy, but doing it that way lets you work around the SAN restriction. You can mount the NAS from the ESX server, run VCB to back the VM up to the NAS device and go from there, but the commandline interface is a little tricky. This is what we do, we had a consultant come in and set this up for us. If you just want one-time backups, this might be enough for you. Hope this helps. Ryan -----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Hodgson Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 3:03 AM To: blind-sysadmins Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Vmware - copy an image to a safe place Hi, I have now finished the project and have two machines I want to convert - a web server and a database server. I looked at the Vmware converter, but am not sure what image format to choose - a Vmware workstation format or a virtual appliance? I am not going to be distributing this image to anyone, I just want to put it on a 1TB NAS so that it backs up to tape. I also notice that with our starter license we have a consolidated backup license, can I use this to do the same thing? Thanks. Andrew. -----Original Message----- From: Ryan Shugart [mailto:rshugart@pcisys.net] Sent: 10 September 2008 05:10 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Vmware - copy an image to a safe place Hi Andrew: By safe place, do you mean somewhere else on the ESX server itself where you will have a copy in case you make a mistake and misconfigure something, or on another server completely? If on the same server, your best bet is to copy the vmdk files using Vmkfstools -i You can find out more in the man page. If, however, you want to copy to another server you have several options. You can just plane SCP and SFTP to pull the files off, this should work fine for copying the files off the server, but it might cause problems when you try to upload them again. Your VMs will boot fine, but you'll loose some of the advantages of having your VMs on a specialized file system, in short fragmentation is more likely because you're using non VMFS aware tools to write to VMFS. Its still an option though. The better way to do this with what you have is to download the free VMWare converter from VMWare's web site, and use that to move the images somewhere else. It can take a long time to move one image (long time defined as up to 30 minutes), but it works well, and honestly without any shared storage or anything like that I believe that'll be your best bet. When you get a Virtual Center server, that will come with a more advanced version of VMWare Co nverter that has more functions and will work a little faster, but for now the free one should do what you want. Let me know if you have any questions on the process. Ryan -----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Hodgson Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 8:56 AM To: blind-sysadmins Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Vmware - copy an image to a safe place Hi, I am doing well with my Vmware training system which I am working on, I have several web and database servers now set up. I want to copy all these server images to a safe place, but what is the best way to do this? I am on the starter edition of ESX with the Vmware client and nothing else. Thanks. Andrew. -- allpay.net Limited, Fortis et Fides, Whitestone Business Park, Whitestone, Hereford, HR1 3SE. Registered in England No. 02933191. UK VAT Reg. No. 666 9148 88. Telephone: 0870 243 3434, Fax: 0870 243 6041. 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