I have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.1 (Tikanga) VMware ESX 4.1 (Kandinsky), and my plan is to backup the files from the box to a NAS in another host. I have already resolve the ssh connection of the two hosts and now I wanna use rsync to copy files from ESX to NAS and I wanna execute it via crontab. The NAS has an rsync installed but the ESX has no rsync installed. It already took me a week figuring out how to install rsync in the server, but I can't get it to work. Please give some suggestions, thank you so much in advance.
2 Answers
VMware ESX/ESXi is not a general-purpose operating system. You really should not use rsync to back up your virtual machine data. If possible, try to use purpose-built backup application intended for VMware use or back up your VMs from within their respective operating systems.
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You can use any backup software that supports vmware. e.g. Veeam (Disclaimer: I DON'T work for veeam), or even VMware's own Data Protection Appliance.
I guess most of the applications are capable of backing up to a NAS share, either by running the Backup software on the ESX with the NAS mounted, or directly using NFS/CIFS.
Also, If I understand correctly, you have just one VM (RHEL) to Backup. You could just backup this VM using RSync (within the VM), not caring about ESX at all.
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