Backup & Recovery

Chapter 23. VMware and Miscellanea

No matter how we organized this book, there would be subjects that wouldn’t fit anywhere else. This chapter covers these subjects, including important information such as backing up volatile filesystems and handling the difficulties inherent in gigabit Ethernet.

Backing Up VMware Servers

The popularity of VMware virtual servers has grown significantly in the last few years, prompting questions on how to back them up. First, we’ll describe the architecture of VMware and follow that with a discussion of how to back it up.

VMware Architecture

VMware currently comes in two basic flavors, VMware Server and VMware ESX Server. VMware Server is a free version of VMware that offers basic virtual server capabilities and runs inside Linux or Windows. Each virtual machine is represented as a series of files in a subdirectory of a standard filesystem that you specify; the subdirectory carries the name of the virtual machine. For example, if you’ve chosen to store your virtual machines in /vmachines, and you have a virtual host called Windows 2000, its files will be located in /vmachines/Windows 2000.

While VMware Server runs inside standard Linux or Windows, VMware ESX Server uses a custom Linux kernel and a custom filesystem, VMFS, to store virtual machine files. You can also store virtual machine files on raw disk partitions. Neither the raw disk partitions or files in a VMFS filesystem can be accessed by all backup commands, so you probably need to back them ...