Peter Van Eeckhoutte's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘esx’

Today, I will try to explain 2 techniques that will allow you to backup your vmdk files (virtual machines) on a VMWare ESX 3.0.x server. My lab runs on 3.0.2, but this will work on 3.0.1 (and maybe earlier versions) as well. Before continuing, let’s make a couple of assumptions :

I will explain how to backup the virtual machines to another location on the SAN. Although one of the scripts that will be explained in this document will allow you to backup using 3rd party software or copy the files over the network to another server (using NFS, FTP, SMB, …), I’m not going to explain that because I don’t use commercial 3rd party software myself. Furthermore, I’m sure you can figure out how to backup the backup copy yourself
We will backup machines while they are powered on. There’s …

While finishing the setup of my VMWare ESX infrastructure, I needed to move a couple of virtual machines from a VMWare Server (running on Windows XP) to my ESX server. Migrating most of those machines was relatively easy : I booted the virtual machine using the VMWare convertor cd and used the convertor to move that virtual machine to ESX. However, this technique did not work for my Longhorn beta 3 server. That machine was created as a "Vista (experimental)", and apparently the vmware convertor doesn’t recognize it (yet). Result : the vmware convertor died with a "Unable to determine Guest OS" error message. I used the following technique to move the vmdk files to ESX manually : First of all, Download FastSCP from http://www.veeam.com/veeam_fast_scp.asp and install …