Patrick is right - all manner of problems can ensue trying to restore a vm backed up from the host. Treat them as physical machines and DR is much more reliable. You may get away with it but you can end up with an inoperable VM because things weren't in sync on disk, or your snapshots were being accessed or some voodoo was happenning at the time.
Barry -----Original Message----- From: Patrick M. Hausen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: 14 February 2008 19:54 To: Stefan G. Weichinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: Amanda user's group <amanda-users@amanda.org> Subject: Re: Backing up VMware-VMs Hi! > For a client I have to dump VMware-VMs with amanda We install Amanda inside the VM's OS, most of the time FreeBSD. I don't see a fundamental difference from a backup point of view between a virtual and a "real" server. If you backup VMs from the outside, you are bound to copy the virtual disk in its entirety to the backup medium at every run, even with incrementals, because the virtual disk file will have changed. I can imagine implementing your scheme with rsync's capability to create incrementals of single files, not only of DLEs. With dump or tar, you are simply wasting a lot of backup media. HTH, Patrick M. Hausen Leiter Netzwerke und Sicherheit -- punkt.de GmbH * Vorholzstr. 25 * 76137 Karlsruhe Tel. 0721 9109 0 * Fax 0721 9109 100 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.punkt.de Gf: Jürgen Egeling AG Mannheim 108285
