Acronis TrueImage 2013 to backup VMWare Workstation live?

[ddrueding]

This is my crazy idea for the evening. I have a Win7 Ultimate x64 machine running VMWare Workstation 9.0.1. Upon which are 14 production VMs.

I would like to install Acronis TrueImage 2013 on the host, and backup the entire thing live using the "Nonstop Backup" feature.

1) Anyone try this before?
2) Thoughts on how best to test the VMs for corruption after a test restore?
3) Other thoughts?

 

[Mercutio]

I've not been very impressed with Acronis Nonstop Backup in any implementation to date. I have not tried the 2013 version.

Are you trying to back up live VMs? Are you at least going to snapshot them or something prior to imaging?

My guess is that you'll wind up with technically bootable .VMDKs after a recovery that are missing some fraction of important data because the hypervisor was lazy writing it back out to disk.

 

[ddrueding]

I can snapshot them, but I was hoping not to have to. The computer is powerful enough that there shouldn't be any appreciable queue lengths, but I see your point. Can you think of an easy way to test for minor data corruption/loss issues? The biggest concern would be the SQL 2008 server.

 

[ddrueding]

Also, I haven't purchased anything yet. Do you have a different program capable of live imaging that I should be trying instead?

 

[Mercutio]

Are you doing any kind of dismount or backup on SQL Server? That's something you can configure through Management Studio and the instructions for doing it are completely google-able.

I'm not sure how to tell you to test, except that a live database would be wonderful. The problem I always have with that stuff is that my database developers never really keep me in the loop on what their projects should be doing, so as far as I'm concerned, I'm happy if the database mounts cleanly and the services are running. Supposedly they're doing their own snapshots on top of whatever I'm doing but the couple times it's been critical to do a recovery, it's come out of my daily backup and there's been some lost data. I don't think TrueImage Home or Workstation are as database-aware as we might wish it to be. There IS a TrueImage addon for getting live data snapshots from MSSQL, but that's not valid for your needs since you're effectively imaging files rather than live data that's in RAM.

Personally, I have my VMs write a normal backup to a second storage volume on ESX and then copy it off that drive with scp. It's not as fast as I'd like and I'm backing up the OS rather than the .vmdk, but I've found it to be recoverable in a fairly painless fashion.

 

[ddrueding]

I am pulling a copy of the SQL database while dismounted from time to time. That seems to be the only way to get a copy that our vendor's app doesn't complain about. The thing is an utter mess and needs to be rebuilt. The nightly online backups fail 80%+ of the time, and even when it succeeds the vendor's app won't load the data 50% of the time. The best I can do is make everyone aware of the situation and prepare to cover my ass when it goes wrong. Frankly, I'd take a day's worth of data loss so long as everything started up correctly.

 

[CougTek]

You can try with Acronis, but don't forget Macrium Reflect. I prefer it to Acronis. Too bad it's not available in French or I would tell my customers to use it too. Since you obviously don,t need another language than English, you should be happy with it. I admit I've never tried to backup live VM with it though.

I think Bozo likes Macrium too.

 

[Bozo]

Yes, I like Macrium. Acronis does a good job, but the GUI gives me hemorrhoids.
If you use Server 2008, the built in back up is good too. I have made backups with it on live systems running SQL Server without issue.

 

[Handruin]

Would the free Veeam backup tool be a better (and less complicated) approach?

There is a free vs paid comparison here if this helps sway your decision.

 

[CougTek]

Wow, looks like a must-have utility for running VM in production. You use it at work?

 

[Handruin]

Wow, looks like a must-have utility for running VM in production. You use it at work?

True be told, no. I honestly don't care about backups in my environment because 95% of the virtualized infrastructure is for testing with a few VM machines running as Samba/Jenkins which holding software builds and tools which all have their source in a properly managed SVN repo. If we get corruption the test is now invalid anyway and I'll just redeploy/rebuild from clean. Our products ship as SLES-based virtual appliances so we easily deploy them using OVF deployments. THey typically spin up in 3-4 minutes fully configured with IPs, hostnames, etc.

Test data is stored on a corporate drive that is backed up but not the VM. Even if I'm to test fate I've only seen one instance of corruption in the 3+ years managing this new environment and I'm not even certain it was the storage array's fault. I've seen plenty of faulty disks but RAID helped continue availability along with hotspares being automatically invoked.

If I were to perform backups I'd likely do this on the array side using snapshots. Then again I'm also spoiled with lab hardware which supports these features.

 

[ddrueding]

Would the free Veeam backup tool be a better (and less complicated) approach?

There is a free vs paid comparison here if this helps sway your decision.

When I was on ESXi I had the full version of Veeam backup, and it worked great. But according to their sales guys, they don't make a product that can interact with VMWare Workstation. I would love it if it did, it was awesome.

 

[Mercutio]

Are you still doing the setup with Windows 7 and VMware Workstation?
Have you given any thought to using Hyper-V or Xen?

The push I'm getting is to move to Server 2008 or Server 2012 for my virtual servers because of concerns about the time to restore for my home-made ESX backup combined with easy availability of Windows backup products that now support Hyper V guests. ESX servers have been very reliable for me but the lack of polished and inexpensive backup options is causing headaches.

 

[ddrueding]

I am, I haven't, and I should. Backups are the thing now; everyone can do visualization well enough.

 

[Bozo]

I have XP running virtualized on a Win 7 x64 host using VMware. I installed Acronis on the XP installs and have it scheduled to make a backup to our backup server monthly. When I have a few minutes to spare I use VMware converter to convert the Acronis files to VMare. If I don't get to convert the files right away, it's no big deal as I can convert them when I need them. It only takes about 20 minutes. I also make copies of the VMware files whenever I can take the XP systems off line.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm more worried about something like database corruption on a guest because the disk-level snapshot isn't aware of what sorts of operations a guest OS might be doing. If I'm on Windows, I can get Shadow copies at both the hypervisor and the guest level, which is good for peace of mind, and I can get relatively inexpensive backup products with bigger feature sets than "Copy a .VMDK off the local data store." Which is what I have been doing.