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I'm trying to backup VMs using a CentOS 6.5 VM and a tape library, the tape library is connected via SAS pass-through and it mounts on CentOS. The backup will be done copying the entire VM folder on the hosts's VMFS datastores (with vmx, vmdks, etc.) to the tape library mount on CentOS using cp -r. I already tried using scp from the ESX host, but it copies at 13 MB/s, too low for a 3TB backup.

Is there a way to mount the host VMFS directly on a guest?

peterh
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Paulostation
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1 Answers1

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As far as I know, there's no way to pass a VMFS volume up to a guest, but I also can't see why you'd need to do it. Either way, you wouldn't be able to read it with anything other than the the SDK since it's a proprietary format.

If you're looking to backup your VMs, you should really be looking at the APIs provided by vSphere and use a tool meant for the job.

A quick Google search for 'vSphere Backup' turns up a number of vendors, some of which offer a free version of their products with either a) limited capacity, or b) limited functionality.

That said, if you're licensed you could just use VMware's vSphere Data Protection and be done with it.

GregL
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  • For now, I'll be using just vSphere Data Protection, the original idea was to make a redundancy backup of the vSphere Data Protection disks using the tape library. I did a quick look at the APIs and they are exactly what I was looking for, just a little more complicated. Thank you. – Paulostation Jun 25 '15 at 17:39