Simple [NOT FREE] VMWare ESX virtual machine backups
EDIT: as of 3/1/2009, my free license for esXpress expired, and unfortunately – although the GUI interface still lists an available option as “FREE” as far as licensing goes – esXpress will not work in free mode after your trial license expires. They really need to update their GUI to reflect this and not just blame this on “There was an old document on the web site that had incorrect information, that has now been corrected.” Disappointing to say the least. With that said…
I run a decent-sized, fairly simple ESX environment as I’ve mentioned before – so simple, in fact, that the powers that be feel I’m fine admin’ing at all alone. 
Something I’d been struggling with for a while was an easy, straightforward way to back up all the VMs that we have in place – and I had originally sought to rely on Vizioncore’s vRanger Pro. However, I’ve been using that product for a few weeks in evaluation and have come away disappointed – when trying to run multiple backups with the product installed on my VirtualCenter server, I ran into too many (seemingly) .NET-related errors to be reliable. Instead, I set up a second Windows machine dedicated to VM backups – a more expensive option, even considering Vizioncore’s relatively low price point.
Well, enter TechTarget’s Best Virtualization Products of 2008 in which they rate PHD Technologies’ esXpress, v3.1 at the top of the bunch – so I tried it out. And boy, color me impressed.
The setup for esXpress is decidedly different than vRanger, but roughly just as easy. For vRanger, you need a Windows server that the vRanger software can live on – it then connects directly to your ESX host or through VirtualCenter through a properly-credentialed ESX account (such as root if you like living dangerously). In the most basic form that I was running it in, it creates Windows scheduled tasks that specify vRanger command-line arguments – and the only way that I could seem to get my backups to run reliably was one at a time, spread out over the night, using individual scheduled tasks. I detailed my original problem with Vizioncore a little way’s back.
The setup for esXpress is very different – esXpress installs as an rpm on the VM host itself, utilizing a VM GUI config host and a second, VBA helper VM that handles the movement of your backup data to an external server or local storage, if you’d like. Running manual backups or restores then becomes a simple process of firing up an SSH client to your VM host, typing “phd,” and navigating a set of very familiar Linux-CLI-GUI menus. Getting started with esXpress backups was a lot faster than I thought it was going to be.
When the esXpress dumps out the resulting files needed for restore, they can transfer these across the network in a variety of ways – I chose FTP, which can be configured to run as a service on an Openfiler NAS (I love how infrastructure comes together like that…). Other options are SMB and SCP. One of the nicest things about esXpress is that they take a very kind view of your backup data: it’s yours. The restoration process is a simple process of unzipping a full backup:
zcat fullbackup.gz.phd > newfile-flat.vmdk
Thinking ahead to how backup technologies will evolve for ESX, this is a welcome piece of news in knowing that my backup archives are based on a standard that wouldn’t even require the re-installation of esXpress. In fact, they make a point to say that you’re not licensing their restore technology as it already exists within ESX/Linux (scp to get the files there, gzip to get them uncompressed).
Finally, there is this point to be said about their licensing:
After the DEMO period has expired, encryption, Intelligent Delta and archive features require a license key to continue operating. Otherwise, if you are happy with daily FULL backups, feel free to continue using esXpress for FREE. The esXpress software remains fully functional with no restrictions on its use after the DEMO period has ended.
At this point, I’m not as concerned about performance as I am about reliability. My original choice for ESX VM backups, vRanger, just didn’t seem to be ready for production use considering the number of times I ran into failed backup jobs – and my intent here is to prepare for disaster recovery. But in my initial testing, esXpress is fast. 59gb/hr transfer rates mean that all of my production VMs can get fully backed up to external storage in about 2 or 3 hours. For free.
As I said, color me impressed.
More reading for esXpress:
- esXpress Documentation
- Comparison between esXpress and vRanger
- Preparation and installation of esXpress
- esXpress Backup Appliance @ VMWare’s Appliance Marketplace
Categorised as: Virtualization
Did you ever evaluate or consider Veeam Backup. I find it has substantial features, great speed, and very easy to use. In our environment we tested vRangerPro which was old antiquated software like you mentioned. We also evaluated the PHD ESXpress solution and Veeam. Veeam Backup built on top their great free tool FastSCP just won hands down.
Just curious to see if you took a look at it as well. Cheers!
BOOOOOOOOOOORRRring!!!
esXpress has free edition which is good. But unfortunately their backup approach is not supported by VMware, so cannot be used it in production. According to VMware support statement, currently the only supported VMware backup methods are VCB, and legacy agents running inside VMs. But esXpress does not support VCB. Alas!
Thanks for the heads-up, John and Tony – I did look at Veeam Backup, but unless I’m missing something, they don’t offer a completely free version of their product. In my current situation, faced with tight budgets and lack of familiarity of virtualization infrastructure on the part of management, finding a tool like esXpress was like stumbling on a gold mine, albeit a little bit slower gold mine.
Cecil: it’s my job, dude. I happen to like this stuff
Tony, I understand the lack of support from VMWare – but I’ve always been somewhat surprised that an enterprise-class product like VI3 doesn’t come with an EASY backup tool to use. VCB is somewhat of a mystery to anyone getting started with their products (including me at first) and legacy agents defeat the purpose of easy bare-metal restores of your VMs. As for support, I’ll take the risk!
What I’ve found with the last two virtualization deployments I’ve worked on, time was spent on purchasing the product (VMWare) and hardware (in our case, nice HP DL-series servers) but not backup solutions. Trying to get a few extra thousand dollars allocated after the fact is often hard to do, and this is where esXpress has stepped in quite nicely for us.
– mike