Backup tool for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 ?

Question

I am seeking a backup tool to back-up virtual OS instances run through Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. According to the MS docs, it should be possible to do it live through volume shadow copy service, but I am having trouble finding any tool for any.

What are the best solution to back-up MS Virtual Server instances?

Answer 1

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc720377.aspx http://support.microsoft.com/kb/867590

There appear to be a number of ways you can do this.

Answer 2

I'm personally fond of using ImageX to capture the VHD to a WIM file. (This is called file-based imaging, as opposed to sector-based imaging.) WIMs are sort of like an NTFS-specific compression format. It also has a single-instance store, which means that files that appear multiple times are only stored once. The compression is superb and the filesystem is restored perfectly with ACLs and reparse points perfectly intact.

You can store multiple VHDs and multiple versions of those VHDs in a WIM. Which means you can backup incremental versions of your VHD and it'll just add a little delta to the end of the WIM each time.

As for live images, you can script vshadow.exe to make a copy of your virtual machine before backing it up.

You can capture the image to WIM format in one of two ways:

1. Mount the virtual machine you want to capture in Windows PE using Virtual Server. Then run ImageX with the /CAPTURE flag and save the WIM to a network drive.
2. Use a tool like VHDMount to mount the virtual machine as a local drive and then capture with ImageX. (In my experience VHDMount is flaky and I would recommend SmartVDK for this task. VHDMount is better for formatting disks and partitioning.)

This only skims the surface of this approach. I've been meaning to write up a more detailed tutorial covering the nuances of all of this.

Answer 3

Hi, I'm using BackupChain for Virtual Server 2005 as well as VMWare. It creates delta incremental files which only contain file changes and takes snapshots while the VMs are running. This way we save a lot of storage space and bandwidth because it sends the backups via FTP to another server. Sav