Acronis Backup on a server VM - Mea Culpa

[jimbo45]

Hi there
I made a little error (just a small peccadillo) on discussing backup on a server virtual machine with Acronis.

( I was in a pub drinking a beer with my Lunch and demoing a virtual W2K3 server on a laptop to a colleague who didn't think it would work fast -- Free Lunch and beer today ).

True you can't install the desktop version of acronis on the server and whilst the stand alone version of acronis works (just boot from the CD) works it occurred to me I'm running a VIRTUAL SERVER.

So the obvious thing is just to backup the Virtual disks on the HOST machine -- see what a nice glass of Beer does - especially when its free.

That way you can schedule backups, have incremental backups and use compression rather than use the clone method which just copies the files byte for byte without compression.


If you organise your VM's properly keep most of the data on Networked drives so your VM data space doesn't have to be large and it makes it easier to share common data between the Real and Virtual environment.

Also if you change Virtual machines or move them users don't have to worry about losing data.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[s0me0ne]

I had trouble understanding what you did. Did you backup your host machine onto the VM or backup the VM's data onto the host or the network the host is on?

 

[pparks1]

He backed up the virtual machine onto the host machine. He essentially boots the VM from the Acronis CD and then backs up the files to the host.

My question is: Once you boot into Acronis and say you want to backup....how do you indicate that you want to backup to the host drive running the VM. As far as i know, this drive would not be available to the VM.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi pparks

1) On the HOST the virtual machine files are only "Data files" so can be backed up with the normal data backup run from within the HOST environment (just as any other backup) - you don'teven need to shut the VM down but I would logoff any users on it when you want to back it up.

2) If you want to backup from the VM with the boot media -- you just set the virtual bios to boot from the CD / DVD bootable media (USB booting not yet available from Virtual Bios), and boot from the CD FROM INSIDE THE GUEST VM..

The program will have access to all the disks that the virtual machine had access to including network drives so you can back up say an image of the virtual "C" drive to a network drive that the Virtual machine has access to -- it's just the same as using a real machine and booting from a DVD / CD.

(Of course if you run the backup program from the HOST you can't Image the virtual "C" drive as the Host just sees the VM files as pure data - even if you boot from the bootable medis - on the HOST SYSTEM).


Hope this clears it up (Eng is not my native language).

Cheers
jimbo

 

[aem]

He backed up the virtual machine onto the host machine. He essentially boots the VM from the Acronis CD and then backs up the files to the host.

My question is: Once you boot into Acronis and say you want to backup....how do you indicate that you want to backup to the host drive running the VM. As far as i know, this drive would not be available to the VM.

So you mean to say, Acronis won't be able to see the host drive during backup, running in VM? What drives does it sees?

 

[jimbo45]

He backed up the virtual machine onto the host machine. He essentially boots the VM from the Acronis CD and then backs up the files to the host.

My question is: Once you boot into Acronis and say you want to backup....how do you indicate that you want to backup to the host drive running the VM. As far as i know, this drive would not be available to the VM.

So you mean to say, Acronis won't be able to see the host drive during backup, running in VM? What drives does it sees?

Hi there.

Running Acronis in a VM Acronis will see it's OWN C (and any other LOCAL) drive(s) and any Network drives it has access to.

That's what you can backup -- you can back it up to any Networked drive that the VM has access to of course.

You can only IMAGE LOCAL DRIVES or PARTITIONS but you can backup data of course including entire drives but for NON LOCAL drives you can only backup in DATA MODE.

Drives on your Host machine (or any others on your LAN) will only be seen from INSIDE the VM if they are defined (on the relevant machines - including the HOST as shared and will be seen by the VM as normal Network drives just like a REAL machine would see network drives.

On the HOST the VM data will be seen by the .vdk (or .vhd) type files in the directory where you have defined your virtual machine.

Cheers
jimbo