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We currently use Esxpress for our production servers but am wondering if there are any free alternatives that will do incremental or "delta" backups of VM's? Preferably for ESX and ESXi.

Thanks,

Matt

Dentrasi
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2 Answers2

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I'm not aware of any software that does this. However, if what could do is have a cron job on the server, which takes a snapshot of the VM (so you can access the VMKD), and then rsync the file off the server. Since busybox (the core of ESXi) doesn't have rsync, you'd have to do it from another machine, but it should work fine, as long as you've enabled SSH.

The other option you've got is if the filesystem you use for storing the VMs supports snapshots (like ZFS does), you could take the backups from there.

BackupExec has a VMware agent - have you looked at that?

Dentrasi
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We currently use a home-grown solution based around http://xdelta.org/ to save the differences between the last full backup and the current disk snapshot. We use LVM for snapshots, but you could use ESX snapshots instead.

Dan
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