At this stage of the development (rc2), restoring virtual machines with esXpress v3.0 is a manual process. That will change soon with restore options built into the GUI.
When you make a backup of a virtual machine with esXpress, you have a full backup of each disk of the virtual machine plus index backups with only the changes. These index backups are actually executable. So the only thing you need to do is to execute such an index backup and start the restore. The restore script will either find the full backup automatically or you can point to the full backup using the menu options.
So to start a restore (using rc 2), copy an index file to the ESX server using sftp (e.g. Bitvise Tunnelier). In this example, I copied a file called 00-vmgeba_test.vmdk.delta-2006.11.09-0028-061109-0028.phd from the FTP server to the ESX box (delta in the filename means it contains only the changes). I copied to a VMFS volume that had enough space.
From an ssh shell, I could then run the 00-vmgeba_test.vmdk.delta-2006.11.09-0028-061109-0028.phd executable because it is a script. Just issue the command:
sh 00-vmgeba_test.vmdk.delta-2006.11.09-0028-061109-0028.phd
The script will launch and present a menu.
Because I only copied the index file and not the full backup, the text FULL BACKUP NOT FOUND is displayed. You can pull the backup from an FTP server but in this case, I copied the full backup file to the ESX server as well. When you then execute the delta, you will get:
As you can see, the full backup is automatically found because it is in the same location as the index file. Now it is just a matter of using the R option to restore the file. You will get a few questions about the location for the new vmdk file and at the end you will get:
When this process finishes, you have a vmdk file that you can use with a virtual machine. In this case, the vmdk file that was backed up was called vmgeba-test.vmdk. That’s of course just a stub. The actual data is in vmgeba-test-flat.vmdk.
A bit tricky here is that the stub file (vmgeba-test.vmdk) is for a buslogic disk. Because the default for Windows Server 2003 is lsilogic, you should change the stub. This can be done from the menu with the C option (Create GSX/Server Stub File). When you choose that option, you will get the chance to specify that you want lsilogic. You can also skip this step and change it from VI Client.
You can now create a new virtual machine and point to the stub when you add the disk. The nice thing about this whole process is that it allows you to restore a virtual machine without needing esXpress itself. You just need a full backup and index backups to start the restore process. Useful!!!
