Minion - my ESXi build! :-)

[BLKMGK]

Veeam Backup Free Edition is pretty fast for migrating and backing up guest.

 

I use it to migrate guests from one datastore to another or from one server to another. I just run it from my management guest on the ESXi box itself.

the only limit is you must have a real email address.

 

Ah, now that sounds interesting! What do they consider a "real" email address? Something corporate? If so that I can handle no problem. I will take a look at that one for sure, the price is certainly right! I need to find a good backup package for use at work too. I've got some UEFI machines that Acronis barfs on and I've got the very latest version. Thankfully this won't be an issue with VM

 

Thank you both!

[Johnm]

Veeam Backup Free Edition is pretty fast for migrating and backing up guest.

 

I use it to migrate guests from one datastore to another or from one server to another. I just run it from my management guest on the ESXi box itself.

the only limit is you must have a real email address.

 

Ah, now that sounds interesting! What do they consider a "real" email address? Something corporate? If so that I can handle no problem. I will take a look at that one for sure, the price is certainly right! I need to find a good backup package for use at work too. I've got some UEFI machines that Acronis barfs on and I've got the very latest version. Thankfully this won't be an issue with VM

 

Thank you both!

Yes. a corporate email account. (they will spam and call you to buy it also).

I actually use another program on my work production boxes (corporate mandate) but i use the Veeam free on lab PC's and at home.

The Veeam free is manual backups only. you need to buy it for automated backups.

[BobPhoenix]

The only thing I should mention about Acronis is that if you use the linux boot (I.E non PE boot) then you need to change the VM to be linux temporarily when using Acronis.  So when I'm copying a Windows VM I change it to linux 2.6 32 bit and then boot the recovery media.  Once the copy is complete I set it back to a Windows VM.

[BLKMGK]

A couple of updates...

 

Both FreeNAS and NAS4Free require tweaks when run under ESX.

 

hw.pci.enable_msi="0" # Driver Interrupts problem SAS2008
hw.pci.enable_msix="0" # Driver Interrupts problem SAS2008

 

Need to be added to the loader.conf file for both FreeBSD based systems. Also, FreeNAS was reporting IRQ storms at the console, the fix for this in my case was to reduce the VM to just one available CPU. Other suggestions were to remove peripherals that aren't needed like floppy drives but I wasn't using this anyway.

 

I had a heck of a time with NAS4Free. I could get it sharing CIFS okay but could never get NFS figured out well enough to use the software as a datastore provider. FreeNAS on the other hand was much easier and I have a mirrored pair of drives providing a datastore now.

 

Next up - I want to figure out what this "special internal NIC" everyone mentions for ESX. It's apparently used for internal transfers and is very high speed. I see a NIC listed that appears to be for this in my VM properties as an option but I'm not sure what the restrictions are or how best to utilize it. Since FreeNAS is going to be a datastore provider I want it to be as fast as possible - should I use this?

 

I also want to figure out how to create a VM disk to be used by unRAID. I will use this as a cache drive and while I've got a sort of fuzzy idea as to how this should be done I've not done it. I'd appreciate an explanation as to how EXACTLY this gets created and given to unRAID.

 

All in all the last few days I've learned a bunch and my thanks to this forum for some really good information on this stuff!