TABLE OF CONTENTS You probably picked up this book because you need to automate some functions in your virtual infrastructure. Scripting is all about automating our menial tasks. And no menial task begs for automation more than regular backups. Fortunately, VMware provides a rich platform for effective backup and restore solutions that can be controlled through scripts. In this chapter, we will exploit the functionality provided by VMware ESX Server to perform hot (that is, live, while VM is running) backups of our virtual machines. We ll show how to back up the data files and config files. In addition, we ll veer a bit out of the command line and into some consultative topics. We ll discuss the whys and hows of recovery planning for a virtual infrastructure. This will help you decide how you should implement a solution using the scripts and technologies presented in this chapter.
Before getting into details, it is important to briefly discuss the fundamentals of a VM backup. The feature of virtualization that enables disaster recovery backup is encapsulation. In the VMware ESX world, this is the virtual hard disk, or VMDK. A VMDK file contains the entire contents of a hard disk, the partitions, boot sector, files, everything. A VMDK takes the thousands of files involved in a typical OS and bundles them all together in one VMDK file. We have the ability to create a copy of a VMDK and use this as a complete backup, then treat the backup as...
