Simple Free VMware Backups

May 20, 2012 0 By Eric Shanks

If you need to backup some of your virtual machines, maybe it’s time to consider VMware Data Recovery 2.0. This VMware appliance provides an easy way to backup some virtual machines for free, but if you’re looking for a large scale backup solution it might be necessary to use more traditional backup solutions from Symantec or Veeam.

To get started, download the VMware Data Recovery iso from vmware.com. The iso includes a plugin for vCenter as well as an OVF for deploying the appliance. Once you’ve deployed the OVF template and installed the vCenter plugin, you can open the vDR from the solutions and applications section of the vCenter console.

The first time you open the vDR console it will be necessary to configure the appliance that you’ve deployed via the OVF template. This requires an IP address as well as a login.

When you click the connect button a wizard will start up allowing you to setup your login and a file share for backup files.

Setup the backup destinations.

When you click the add network share you’ll get a warning message about the size of the file share, if the share is larger than 500Gb.

Enter in the share credentials and location for storing the backups. You can add multiple shares later if necessary.

The traditional summary screen will then be presented, and the option to configure a backup set will be checked.

Configuring the backup job

Setting up a backup job is pretty straight forward. The common backup settings will be required such as: what to backup, where to backup to, when to back it up, etc.

First give the backup a name. Backup Job 1 is probably not a great description for a backup, but it’s the name of my backup in this example.

Choose the virtual machines that need to be backed up.

Select the backup location. This is the file share we setup earlier. You can always add more shares at this point if necessary.

When should the backup job be allowed to run? Perhaps you don’t want backups to be run during production hours, or a specific time of day because other processing is taking place?

How many backups should be retained? This screen allows you to customize how many backups should be stored in the event that one needs to be restored.