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The Process to Back-up – Automatic/scripted
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#.OVA VMWARE ESXI 5 FULL#
They can be used to take a full dump of a virtual machine in its current state and export it to a file (OVA) or folder of files (OVF). OVF ( Open Virtualization Format) templates are most used as … *surprise* … VM templates. After a bit of searching around, I saw people asking similar questions as to whether you can use these as back-ups there were no definitive answers but after thinking about it, I can’t see why not? I may give this a try later down the line and blog about it if I think it will be useful.Īfter a bit of searching around, I found an inbuilt function in the vSphere client which allows you to export and import OVF templates. There’s a tool I came across called ghettoVCB – it actually seems like quite an advanced and (potentially) flexible shell script, however it looks like it would take some time to set-up. I did take a look at copying the VMs out of the data store either through the vSphere client or SSH but that is a bit messy. Snapshots are in no way shape or form back-ups so that is out of the question. These components can then be shared among tens of virtual machines depending on how you’ve set things up.Īlthough flexible and powerful, I could not find any straight forward back-up guides for backing up my virtual machines. ESXi acts as a really flexible and powerful monster of an operating system which can easily divvy up your server’s physical hardware in to virtualised components.