Installation guide

CHAPTER 3 Using the VMware Management Interface to Manage Your Virtual Machines
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Note: You can also use a virtual machine to run the server component of a client-
server backup product, provided you give it access to one or more tape drives.
Backing up from within a virtual machine has the benefit of allowing fine-grained
recovery of your data.
• You can restore file data by the individual file.
• You can restore database data via the normal database-specific method.
However, if there is a disaster and you need to restore the virtual machine from a
backup made from within the virtual machine, you need to recreate the virtual
machine and load recovery software into it before restoring data from the backups.
To configure a virtual machine so you can use a tape drive from within it, see Adding a
Tape Drive to a Virtual Machine on page 136.
Backing Up Virtual Machines from the Service Console
You may also choose to back up your virtual machines by copying to tape the entire
virtual disk files and any redo logs, along with the backups of the service console. This
approach has the benefit of making it easy to restore your virtual machines in the
event of a full system loss or data loss due to failure of unprotected disks.
However, these full-image backups do not permit you to restore individual files. You
must restore the entire disk image and any associated logs, then power on a virtual
machine with these drives connected to retrieve specific data.
The next section describes how to ensure data integrity when backing up virtual
machines from the physical computer or the service console.
Providing Optimum Data Integrity In Virtual Machine Backups Without
Downtime
You can use the VMware Scripting API included with ESX Server 2.1 in conjunction
with backup products to provide snapshots, or stable disk or redo log images. The
appropriate functions can be called from within many backup products in order to
establish a safe basis for backing up images or logs. You may use this approach with
any disk mode — persistent, undoable, nonpersistent or append.
For information on the Scripting API, see the VMware Scripting API documentation at
www.vmware.com/support/developer/scripting-API/doc/Scripting_API.pdf.
Using Hardware or Software Disk Snapshots
You may choose to use the snapshot capabilities offered by your disk subsystem, file
system or volume manager to provide stable copies of disk images. As with physical