It's times like this that I really miss Byte (or BYTE?) magazine. They would have had great coverage of VMWare VMs - how they work, and what the risks are. Now that's specialist knowledge. Knowledge that, when I use Google, is obscured by a haze of marketing material.
The best we non-specialists can do is share our limited experience in blog posts, like this one sharing my experience with VM backup. That's been a problem for me.
First - my experience. I've used VMWare Fusion on my Macs for a few years. I need it less than once a month, typically to launch XPSP4 and run Access or (yech) Quicken. On the other hand, I configured and use a VMWare Workstation on a 64bit Win7 machine at work. That VM is running a Windows 2003 Server environment with terminal server and I use it very frequently.
Both my Fusion and Workstation VMs are configured to store the VM data as many files rather than a single monolithic file. Both are about 80-100 GB in size and store as little of my data as possible; on the Mac the individual .vmdk files vary in size from about 200 to 500 MB. I don't have the Workstation VM at hand but I think its files are all a fixed size.
The host OS X machine is backed up using Time Capsule (sigh) and SuperDuper! (sigh). Neither give me the warm fuzzies of Retrospect at its best. The Windows 7 machine is backed up using (Dantz -> EMC -> Roxio) Retrospect Professional.
I configured both VMs to use multiple files because of the VM backup problem I knew about.
The obvious backup problem for these machines is that if you configure a VM as one monolithic file, then every time you touch it the host system backup software has to backup a 100GB backup event. That will overload Time Machine (Capsule) or Retrospect pretty quickly. (More sophisticated backup software can manage this differently, but I don't think TM or Retrospect can.)
That's why I went with separate files. Backups would only have to manage the files that changed. (Ahh, but how does the backup software know what's changed - esp. if the files are a fixed size?)
I think that approach does work when the VM is shut down. I think it works on my Mac. It doesn't work with Retrospect Professional on the Windows 7 machine where our VM is always running.
I learned that the hard way when we tried to do a restore. The restored VM seemed good at first, but it was soon clear that we'd somehow ended up with different time slices. We had to kill the VM. Fortunately, because I'm justifiably paranoid about backup, we also had a file system backup that was only a few weeks old. Since we don't keep data on the VM we lost very little.
This is a nasty problem. As best I can tell, at least on Windows, Retrospect Professional can't do a reliable backup of a running multi-file VMWare VM. The limited VMWare marketing material I could find suggests this isn't just a Retrospect problem. The solution is, of course, to buy their costly backup software. You can also do backup from within the client OS, but that adds a new level of cost and complexity to overall backup. Retrospect Professional, for example, won't install on Windows 2003 server. For that you need their much more costly server backup.
Now you know what I know. If you know any more, or can point me to anything that's not marketing material, I'd be grateful.
I do miss Byte.
The best we non-specialists can do is share our limited experience in blog posts, like this one sharing my experience with VM backup. That's been a problem for me.
First - my experience. I've used VMWare Fusion on my Macs for a few years. I need it less than once a month, typically to launch XPSP4 and run Access or (yech) Quicken. On the other hand, I configured and use a VMWare Workstation on a 64bit Win7 machine at work. That VM is running a Windows 2003 Server environment with terminal server and I use it very frequently.
Both my Fusion and Workstation VMs are configured to store the VM data as many files rather than a single monolithic file. Both are about 80-100 GB in size and store as little of my data as possible; on the Mac the individual .vmdk files vary in size from about 200 to 500 MB. I don't have the Workstation VM at hand but I think its files are all a fixed size.
The host OS X machine is backed up using Time Capsule (sigh) and SuperDuper! (sigh). Neither give me the warm fuzzies of Retrospect at its best. The Windows 7 machine is backed up using (Dantz -> EMC -> Roxio) Retrospect Professional.
I configured both VMs to use multiple files because of the VM backup problem I knew about.
The obvious backup problem for these machines is that if you configure a VM as one monolithic file, then every time you touch it the host system backup software has to backup a 100GB backup event. That will overload Time Machine (Capsule) or Retrospect pretty quickly. (More sophisticated backup software can manage this differently, but I don't think TM or Retrospect can.)
That's why I went with separate files. Backups would only have to manage the files that changed. (Ahh, but how does the backup software know what's changed - esp. if the files are a fixed size?)
I think that approach does work when the VM is shut down. I think it works on my Mac. It doesn't work with Retrospect Professional on the Windows 7 machine where our VM is always running.
I learned that the hard way when we tried to do a restore. The restored VM seemed good at first, but it was soon clear that we'd somehow ended up with different time slices. We had to kill the VM. Fortunately, because I'm justifiably paranoid about backup, we also had a file system backup that was only a few weeks old. Since we don't keep data on the VM we lost very little.
This is a nasty problem. As best I can tell, at least on Windows, Retrospect Professional can't do a reliable backup of a running multi-file VMWare VM. The limited VMWare marketing material I could find suggests this isn't just a Retrospect problem. The solution is, of course, to buy their costly backup software. You can also do backup from within the client OS, but that adds a new level of cost and complexity to overall backup. Retrospect Professional, for example, won't install on Windows 2003 server. For that you need their much more costly server backup.
Now you know what I know. If you know any more, or can point me to anything that's not marketing material, I'd be grateful.
I do miss Byte.
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Just a thought -- something I haven't had a chance to setup for myself yet... configure the machine and let it be and start with a fresh slate (so to speak) every time. Have all data accessed from a NAS. Then just back up the NAS.
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