Backing up your virtual machines in VMware ESX and ESXi for free with GhettoVCB!

Hi everyone! In today's virtual word, backups are more important than ever. The ability to put tons of virtual machines on one single server gives you great consolidation ratios but unfortunately also puts all your eggs in one basket. With a risk like that you need to backup those virtual machines.

Now it's very easy to go out there and buy the pay for versions of various pieces of software that leverage VMware's VCB to do the backups of the VMs. But what if you are running the free version of ESXi? How do you backup your VMs then? Well never fear, William Lam, the guy famous for all his scripts has come up with a script called GhettoVCB!

This script allows you to backup all your VMs hot (while they are running) to storage. An easy way to do this is to setup an NFS share and then configure his script.

Here are some of the cool features of GhettoVCB:
How many backups to keep

• Split backups into 2GB files
• Backup virtual machine live, or shut it down first before backup
• Hard power off virtual machine if it doesn’t respond to a guest shutdown command

If you’re interested in implementing this, please read my next blog entry on how to use this wonderful script that William has provided us with. You can also find many of William’s other scripts here at this script web site.

-Cheers, RP