Last updated on Monday 28th of February 2022 08:52:48 PM

How to backup ©ESXi Free with ©XSIBackup-Free edition

©ESXi Virtual Machine backups to local datastores with ©XSIBackup-Free.

Download Download latest edition of ©XSIBackup-Free here

We have recently changed Free and Pro editions of our software ©XSIBackup to use the more robust and efficient technology we developed for ©XSIBackup-DC. The old development line Free edition software that we renamed to ©XSIBackup-Free Classic, to differentiate it from the new line, is still available for download here, it is compatible with any ©ESXi hypervisor from 5.1.0 up to 6.7.0 U3.

A simple backup to a local datastore

New DC line of software is extremely easy to use. It incorporates a full improved ncurses GUI, nonetheless today we will focus this post in how to perform a backup from the command line so that you can start to use our software right away. See how simple it is to backup some VM (as in the video tutorial):

From the installation dir (default /scratch/XSI/XSIBackup-DC)

./xsibackup --backup "VMs(WS2012)" /vmfs/volumes/backup4/TEST-RESPO01



A much more powerful software edition specially designed to backup ©ESXI Free

New Free software edition, compatible with ESXi 7.0 too, allows to backup and replicate VMs of up to 60GB to local datastores once the fully featured trial period expires. New line of development puts special focus on deduplicated backups with selectable block size of 1MB, 10MB, 20MB and 50MB. Our deduplication engine is built into the ©XSIBackup binary, you don't need to do anything else than running ©XSIBackup to be able to achieve full block deduplication plus compression on any reasonably fast file system, easily achieving compression ratios well over 98% for fixed sets of VMs when using the default block size of 1MB.

You could use VMFS-6 to store deduplicated repos too, this propietary FS is very slow when it comes to store this kind of data though, as it has been designed for a somewhat opposite kind of task. Thus we recommend that you use some other file system over NFS for your backups. We strongly recommend ext4 or XFS, as we have taken the time to vastly test this two FS in production scenarios. Any other good real file system will do it, such as BTRFS, etx3, etc..

In the above video tutorial we are performing the simplest kind of backup, namely: backing up a VM to some local datastore folder. This is a deduplicated backup with compression, both are activated by default with a 1MB block size. You should always leave it like that, unless you have some very specific requirements.

All these professional features are free to use

©XSIBackup-Free includes a full set of professional features that you can use to develop your skills or to keep your sets of Virtual Machine backups:

- Full selectable size (1MB, 10MB, 20MB, 50MB) block deduplication.
- nCurses GUI that works over any modern extended resolution SSH client.
- Granular restore of guest FS files from any of the unlimited restore points.
- Zero Awareness: jumps over the empty zones in your guest disks.