iSCSI based ESXi 6.7U3 VM's how to Snapshot individual VMs

[Hjrr]

Running FreeNAS 11.3u5. I have a 3 Server ESXi cluster all connected to a iSCSI share. All the VMs are located on the iSCSI share.
I can of course take a snapshot in VCenter, but when I tried to take a VM SNAPSHOT in FreeNAS it wants to snapshot the entire ESXi DataStore (shows local drives and iSCSI drive) share.

How to take an individual VM snapshot from FreeNAS? What happens if I click SAVE (below)? I do NOT want a snapshot of this entire drive.

 

[sretalla]

How to take an individual VM snapshot from FreeNAS? What happens if I click SAVE (below)? I do NOT want a snapshot of this entire drive.

Looks like you need to re-engineer your setup to solve your request.

You need one ZVOL per VM if you're going to snapshot individual VMs.

If you want to continue as you are, you will get a snapshot covering the entire zvol for each of your machine snapshots (remembering that this doesn't actually represent a lot more data if nothing else is changing, so maybe that's OK), but in that snapshot, only the VM being targeted will have been forced to coalesce, so the references to all the other virtual disks will be untrustworthy.

 

[blanchet]

Indeed you would like to use VMware VVOL with TrueNAS. Unfortuntealy it is still not supported yet. If you instist you can emulate vvol by creating a ZVOL per VM as @sretalla said but it is totally unmanageable.

If you want individual VM backup, use Veeam.

 

[Hjrr]

Veeam? Will the free version support this? Many thanks

 

[blanchet]

Yes, with the Veeam Backup Communitity Edtion you can protect up to 10 VMs. It should be enough for many small businesses.
If you prefer an open-source tool, I heard that bareos can also do the job, but I have never tried.

 

[Hjrr]

ok, Installed VEEAM, added storage , have access to VMs and Backup storage but the jobs die with pre-job error, I opened a ticket with Veeam.

HONESTLY all this b*llshit, WHY DON'T I just take a periodic CLONE of the VM and put it on secondary storage, even without doing snapshots to save space this would be a totally workable solution. Anyone got a script that works with VMWARE and FreeNAS!

 

[sretalla]

Anyone got a script that works with VMWARE and FreeNAS!

These are the extent of what I know exists:

Utility scripts for FreeNAS and VMware ESXi

Spearfoot submitted a new resource: Utility scripts for FreeNAS and VMware ESXi - Scripts for use with FreeNAS-on-ESXi All-In-One systems I've created a GitHub repository containing the scripts I've written for use with my FreeNAS-on-ESXi All-In-One systems...

www.truenas.com

This post has a number of interesting ideas:

How to backup virtual machines on a standalone ESXi host?

Standalone ESXi (4.1) host without any vCenter Server. How to backup virtual machines as quickly and storage-friendly as possible? I know I can access the ESXi console and use the standard Unix cp

serverfault.com

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Haven't you guys heard of ghettoVCB? One stop solution, does all your automated VMware backups, as long as you have a second datastore on e.g. NFS to backup to ...

Completely open source, of course.

GitHub - lamw/ghettoVCB: ghettoVCB

ghettoVCB. Contribute to lamw/ghettoVCB development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[sretalla]

Haven't you guys heard of ghettoVCB

I was looking for that link too.

 

[NugentS]

Back in VMWare 3.3 I wrote a set of scripts a bit like ghettoVCB. A tad more buggy / feature written though - I never did fix the "if a guest name has a space in it it won't back up" due to the way I was finding which machines were on which host. Worked well within its limitations.
gettoVCB is a much better version of what I did - but at the end of the day its just a script calling API's.
The biggest issue is that it does complete backups everytime - rather than with any form of change block tracking so it uses a lot of space.

Veeam I had nothing but trouble with. It worked, but I was never comfortable with it
Archiware Pure (or was it P5) worked (either on a server or synology), but had some interesting design decisions that I did not agree with. Worked much better on a guest than on a Synology or QNAP which didn't really have the horsepower when I tested it and the version tended to be out of date. What they did really well was keep the Archiware config files in the backups. So it you lost the backup server (not the backups obviously) when you lost the host cluster (for some reason) it didn't really matter. Quickly build a new guest / install on a new PC, point at the backup datastore and voila - you had the whole backup config back again

Currently I use Synology's Active Backup for Business which works really well. No artificial limits. Does CBT and (so far) just works. And its free. You do need a x86 CPU in the Synology, so can't use one of the weedy little boxes. But as long as you have semi-decent hardware it works well

 

[Hjrr]

True the ghettoVCB does a full clone and it does take time, depending on how fast your storage is, but for me it is a working solution.
Nothing else has been working for me. VEEAM sees everything but errors out before even starting the BU. I tried one of the built in FreeNas plugin backup solutions "A" (forgot the name already) and it looks like a clumsy beast with too many moving parts and separate BU and client installs. I had to delete all of that. So ghettoVCB is the way to go for me. THANKS EVERYONE FOR YOUR SUPPORT!