VMWare Esxi. Automatic creation of snapshots or copies of virtual machines. What's better?

Question

Backup

Situation. There are various virtual machines (Windows XP/7, Ubuntu server+MySQL, etc.) on the server with VMWare Esxi 5 installed. We thought

about automatically saving the state of the machines. So that when a new state is created, the old ones are deleted.

Googling on this topic, a certain script ( ghettoVCB.sh ) was found, written for this task.

The problem is that these copies will take up a lot of space on the server, I guess. While studying the possibility of creating snapshots (like the mechanism for creating automatic snapshots, implemented in VmWare Workstation: AutoProtect snapshots ) I came across an article: Why snapshots of virtual machines in VMware vSphere...

In this connection, I want to ask more experienced colleagues: what should I do in this situation?

Answer 1

Full backups still need to be made and stored on external storage.
For daily backups - snapshots (of which you can roll back a virtual machine to a stable state in an instant).

Answer 2

It all depends on the task:
For long-term storage - of course, a copy (replica), for online recovery (checking some kind of update or new program) - a snapshot.
Modern virtual infrastructure backup systems take a snapshot, make a copy of the machine based on it, store it in a remote location (storage / tape ...) and then clean the snapshot.
The script resulted by you does exactly that, but only automation and management are lame.
Of the paid ones - a solution from Veeam. In my opinion the best solution for ESX/Hyper-V backup.

Answer 3

There is MKSBackup, a free backup frontend that can integrate with GhettoVCB, among other things. The final convenience and manageability is still lower than that of the same Veeam, but at least it solves chaos with a bunch of scripts and tasks stuffed into hosts.

Answer 4

ghettoVCB does not save memory state. If mysql doesn't binlog, it can be a pain.
I am writing from my own experience.

Answer 5

Snapshots categorically do not recommend! Better than a script. Windows 2012 can do nfs and dedup, that's better.

Answer 6

For backup, I liked the acronis backup for vmware
product. eat IOPS