I know VMware and Virtual Server
technology is becoming more and more prevalent in organizations as both
packages can greatly reduce hardware costs. We've been testing VMware ESX Server
heavily because of its ability to overallocate memory, its very small
footprint as a host operating system, and the ability to use VMotion.
Virtual machines also tend to be quite nice from a recovery
perspective. If you have a copy of the virtual machine file(s), rolling
back changes, or bringing up the VM in a disaster situation means
installing the host OS/application server, copying in the VMs,
registering them, and starting them. Piece of cake!
However, there is an issue with VMware ESX Server if you copy the files
from a non VMFS file system. VMFS is VMware's proprietary file system
where disk images get stored. Going from VMFS to VMFS there aren't any
issues. That's why cloning works so well. However, if you copy from
VMFS to another system, such as a Windows system where the files will
be backed up, there is an issue. It's covered in the following article:
How should I back up virtual machines used in ESX Server?
Even with the following comment in this article, we've seen some
corruption issues which disk files > 2 GB during the transfer:
Some file utility programs can also have problems with files larger than 2GB. SCP and FTP,
however, are capable of handling files larger than 2GB. These tools can
safely be used to move ESX Server virtual disks to other VMFS volumes,
or to back them up on file systems capable of handling files over 2GB.
However, be sure to use binary mode when transferring virtual disks
with FTP.
We've repeated a copy on and were able to get a successful restore
after a failure. This inconsistency is not acceptable. At this point
we're likely going to look at a 3rd party backup utility. While we
could go down the vmkfstools route, that would mean increasing the
complexity, which can lead to problems in a DR situation where minutes
are critical. There may also be something simple we're doing wrong, I
won't discount that. However, it certainly isn't as easy as it was with
