Automate VMware Server Full VM backups with vmsbackup script
August 1st, 2008 | 
Author: If you are running VMware Server on a Linux host and need to automate and schedule a process for backing up your guests then check out Two Bald Geeks’ bash script documented in the post at vmware-server VM backups. In short, the vmsbackup script systematically cycles through all VMs in a designated folder and accomplishes a full guest backup for each. To do this the script suspends the VM, copies it to another location, tars the copied file, removes any existing tars older then a specified time period, and then resumes the source VM again. Creating a Cron job for the script enables the process to be repeated on a scheduled basis.
Here’s some more information taken from the linked post on the strategy behind the script.
“… one can suspend a VM and bring it back up from the command line. That’s the route I’ve chosen. This works for me because our VMs, while very active, do not have large disk images (< 10gig). This means that the time it actually takes to copy the files for a VM should be
less than, say, 5 minutes (SATA -> SATA).The strategy I’ve chosen is to set the home directory for my VMs, iterate through them, suspend them, copy the data to another location, and resume the VM. That gives me minimal downtime, gives me 1 backup right there, and gives me the data that I can tar and compress and transfer off-site at my leisure from there while the VMs are doing whatever it is they do.”
The author has created a Google Code project home page and Google Group for the ongoing development of the script.
http://code.google.com/p/vmsbackup/
http://groups.google.com/group/vmsbackup
The current version of the script can be downloaded form the Google Code page.
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Posted in how to, scripts, vmware server | 
Tags: backup, how to, linux, script, vmware, vmware server
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