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Saturday, February 11, 2017

Backup Free VMware vSphere Hypervisor

If you are running free vmware vsphere hypervisor, you may wonder how to do backup. Starting from ESX/ESXi 4.0, Vmware has disable the API which prevent free ESXi to perform snapshot. You will get this error message when try to backup Free Vmware ESXi.

Error:- "Current vSphere license or ESXi version prohibits execution of the requested operation"



So we cannot perform image level backup from the hypervisor level. For workaround, we use

  • Veeam Agent for Windows - for Windows workload. 
  • Veeam Agent for Linux - for Linux workload. Click here to know more.

In this post, we are going to use Veeam Agent for Windows -Server Edition (currently in beta version.) to protect virtual machine running on free vmware esxi.

Our scenario:-

  • Free Vmware ESXi 6.5
  • Virtual Machine running Windows Server 2016
  • Veeam Agent for Windows- Server Edition
  • Veeam Backup Server (with Repository)
  • optional : Free version or paid version :- Hyper-V 2016
  • optional : Microsoft Azure


You need to install Veeam Agent for Windows - Server Edition in windows virtual machine, perform full backup and point backup data to Veeam repository.



When disaster, you can use Veeam to restore

  • granular item using Veeam Explorer. Without restore entire virtual machine, you can recover an item (SQL, Exchange, Active Directory, Sharepoint, Oracle, File/Folder).

  • export virtual disk to Hyper-V or Vmware disk format. It will perform conversion and convert to Hyper-V or Vmware virtual disk.

  • Instant Recovery to Hyper-V Host. Refer to here. This feature allow user to bring up virtual machine (without restore entire virtual machine). It will mount the backup data to Hyper-V Host, to bring up the virtual machine within 2-3 minutes.


  • Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure. Refer to here.



Hope this alternative work for you.

Enjoy!


Note:- To download Veeam Agent for Windows, click here.