Friday, November 25, 2011

How to live backup VmWare 4.1 image

Sometimes you can not shutdown your VM to properly backup the image, but nice vmkfstools allow you to create hot or live backup or your VM.

To perform live backup you need to:
1. Take a snapshot of running VM. Right click on VM -> Snapshot -> Create snapshot.
2. Login to the host with SSH
3. mkfstools -i source.vmdk -d thin /vmfs/volumes/backup/sameVM.vmdk
4. Wait till cloning is done
5. Don't forget to copy soruce.vmx and source.vmxf files to backup directory
6. Remove snapshot from running VM. Right click on VM -> Snapshot Manager -> Remove ALL

You done!

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