ESXi Free - how to back up xpenology VM?

[mrwiggles]

Have Xpenology running great on ESXi - thank you to the devs and tutorials - but I’d like to backup my VM to avoid down time in the event I need to reinstall/recover from hardware failure. MOST of the 3rd party vm backup options require APIs that the free version of ESXi doesn’t support. And they seem overkill for just wanting a single vm backup. Any suggestions for how to do this? I think I can create snapshots locally to the ESXi instance - but have to shutdown the vm - but that doesn’t save me in the event of hardware failure on that server. So I’d prefer to back up the vm to another NAS or even an external drive if required. This seems like an obvious need for any ESXi users running Xpenology but I haven’t found anything in the forums on best practices for this.

 

Thank you.

[mbu10]

If you go here there is a quite few options for you 

 

https://www.virten.net/2016/04/backup-solutions-for-free-esxi/

this will help

 

[Jordan]

Hello @mrwiggles - could you share in a few words how you finally realized your backup of you VM? I am in the same situation and looking for a solution an how to backup my XPEnology installation on ESXi. 

[Elpatii]

Hello,

 

I use Active Backup for Business from DSM to backup my ESXi. 

You can connect directly your ESXi inside it, you juste have to activate SSH et ESXi Shell: https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/help/ActiveBackup/activebackup_business_requireandlimit#VM

 

You'll need to activate Active Backup for Business: 

 

[flyride]

Make a duplicate of the entire boot environment so you don't have to install from scratch.  That only has to be done after a major upgrade of ESXI.  Then periodically copy the VMX file and the original loader to your local machine?  There really isn't very much to back up on ESXi.