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I have a server with hundreads of vms and the snapshot is very useful to me, on incidents i can restore a vm to a point on time in no time, but i have many datastores where operational data is stored and all bkp is done on LTO tapes, but the restore process of clean data (without virus) take more than 8 hours each time and time is growing as daily data grow too. I have a lot of storage servers here and looking to make snapshots of at least my last datstore state to allow fast recovery and cant find one.
I know there is the vm snapshot but there is datastore snapshot on esxi vmware too ?

Norr
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Jhon Wute
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3 Answers3

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Snapshots aren't backups! You really need to follow 3-2-1 backup rule to ensure your data is safe. To accelerate your tape backup and recovery process I'd suggest to go from Disk-to-Tape to Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape: deploy some VTL offloading "cold" backups to either physical tape or AWS S3/Glacier.

BaronSamedi1958
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As BaronSamedi mentioned, to boost up the backup and recovery process you need to use Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape backup. For such case, Starwind VTL is the most suitable solution with an optional offload to Azure and AWS.

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/virtual-tape-library-feature

Also, there is a solution called AcloudA, it will act as a standard SATA or SAS HDD and fit into standard 3.5" drive bay basically presenting the cloud storage as internal memory to the server.

http://aclouda.com/

BaronSamedi1958
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Stuka
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As EEAA correctly stated, you have to do this one level below, on the storage layer. To be more precise, you have to do both - snapshot the VM on ESXi and snapshot the storage on your storage layer:

  1. Snapshot your VM with the builtin snapshot utility of ESXi.
  2. Snapshot your storage where your VM and its snapshots reside (typically, the backing datastore that is exported via NFS or iSCSI and used by ESXi to present a VM datastore). Of course, those snapshots have to be atomic and consistent, so you need a file system that supports those properties (for example ZFS).
  3. Delete/consolidate your ESXi VM snapshot so that it is removed and that it does not slowdown VM operation.
  4. Backup your storage snapshot to another server/medium in a rotation of your choice so that it works as a real backup.

Restore is the reverse process.

user121391
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