Network Engineer who needs ESXi 4.x Help!

[Zetro]

Hey Guys, I apologize right off as I am not a VMware guy. I am a Cisco/HP/SonicWall network engineer who due to staffing shortages is being asked to backup an ESXi 4.1 server with a USB external hard drive.

I understand that I need to have the drive formatted in FAT32, but if someone could post a good link on how to do this (my Google searches yield confusing how to's).

Thank you as always

Trev

 

[jvilla]

late night trollin?

 

[Zetro]

Seriously? I am sorry I am not a VMware professional... I fail to see how this is trolling, I have been asked to solve a problem and as Hardocp has a lot of awesome members I was hoping for a useful solution.

Your comment is not useful, please do not continue to hijack this thread.

(FYI, I have 3 MCITPs, ccda, ccda, HP asi, I am a master cssa with SonicWALL and I feel rather comfortable in saying I am not stupid!)

 

[timta2]

I know nothing about an ESXi 4.1 server, but couldn't you easily format the drive in Windows?

 

[madrebel]

you cant plug in a usb drive and mount it directly to esxi that i'm aware of. esx can but i don't think esxi can.

 

[Child of Wonder]

Assuming you're trying to backup the configuration of the ESXi server, here's the command you need.

http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vcli/vcli41/doc/reference/vicfg-cfgbackup.html

Download and install the vSphere CLI then open it and run:

vicfg-cfgbackup.pl --server <server name or IP> -s C:\serverX_backup.txt

Copy the text file to your USB drive.

If you mean that you need to backup the VMs running on an ESXi server and you don't have access to any sort of backup software, you can power off or suspend a VM and copy its files through the vSphere client. You'll need to right click whatever datastore the VM lives on and select "Browse Datastore." From there you can download the folder the VM resides in. However, make sure you look at the settings of your VM before copying the files. It may have more than 1 hard disk and each could be on a different datastore so make sure you get those, too.

 

[lopoetve]

OH GOD DON'T USE THE DATASTORE BROWSER TO COPY VMS.

For the love of massive corruption! The datastore browser is for log files and ISOs.

File -> export as ovf template. Problem solved

 

[Child of Wonder]

OH GOD DON'T USE THE DATASTORE BROWSER TO COPY VMS.

For the love of massive corruption! The datastore browser is for log files and ISOs.

File -> export as ovf template. Problem solved

Veeam FastSCP works, too. But whatever way you go, it's not going to be very fast.

 

[QHalo]

OH GOD DON'T USE THE DATASTORE BROWSER TO COPY VMS.

For the love of massive corruption! The datastore browser is for log files and ISOs.

File -> export as ovf template. Problem solved

bwahahahaah, we should sticky that for Iopoetve's sanity.

 

[SpaceHonkey]

Veeam FastSCP works, too. But whatever way you go, it's not going to be very fast.

I thought this method didn't do vmdk alignment either...

 

[lopoetve]

I thought this method didn't do vmdk alignment either...

It's "better" than NFC, but dropbear isn't great on ESXi either.

The template method is the best, because it uses the vmkernel datamovers for the vmdk layout/copy.

 

[Zetro]

Beautiful, thank you guys it worked like a charm

Best part of the day was figuring out why their SAN was working so terribly! No jumbo frames or Flow Control turned on the ports, not on its own VLAN (all ports "untagged"), well lets just say that was a good start lol

 

[lopoetve]

Beautiful, thank you guys it worked like a charm

Best part of the day was figuring out why their SAN was working so terribly! No jumbo frames or Flow Control turned on the ports, not on its own VLAN (all ports "untagged"), well lets just say that was a good start lol

Jumbo frames won't help the storage performance on ESX much.