So I've got this fancy new dual node server and some pretty kewl VMs running. I've been living with VMs running on redundant hardware for a few years now, feeling that was enough. But now that these VMs have become pretty heavily customized I was thinking its time for automated backups.
Now I know there are many ways to back stuff up out there, but I really like Veeam for VM specific backups. Veeam Backup and Recovery is free to use for personal purposes and has a powershell component called VeeamZIP that you can use to script against. Also all their enterprise restore features are in the free version, so file level, application level and full level VM stores are all supported.
Well I've been testing it for 2 weeks now and I can say I have a pretty nice little setup going at home. I use my Synology as an iSCSI Thin Provisioned target for my backups and then use powershell VeeamZIP to backup my VMs to the iSCSI drive (locally mapped through Microsoft iSCSI Initiator) with compression, guest quiescing (Application Aware Backups for those whom don't know), and backup lifecycling. It works using Windows Task Scheduler, and my script emails me when it succeeds or fails, and has been very good overall.
Only downfalls to VeeamZIP free edition vs enterprise for my use are (there are many other differences, including scheduling of jobs, backup targets, etc:
- Only Full Backups are Supported
- Only Full VMs are Supported - can't selectively pick only one disk in a multiple disk VM
They also have a Linux version as well: https://www.veeam.com/blog/announcing-linux-server-backup.html
I am now thinking to use my Synology's Cloud Sync features to see if I can take that backup and get it into DropBox should I loose everything in my house.
Exciting times for me! WOOT!
Anyway if anyone is interested I can share the scripts.