Question

Can anyone recommend an automated backup solution that can handle VMWare instances?

I would like something to run overnight, suspend any running virtual machines, back up the files over the network (or hand off to another backup job), and (optionally) resume any VMs that it suspended.

A free/open source solution would be ideal, but I’ll pay for a closed solution if necessary.

Answer 1

You could do this with a scheduled task and a script – Workstation is pretty easy to automate from the command line.

Psuedocode for the script:

for each VM {
  vmrun.exe suspend <path_to_.vmx>
  copy <path_to_vm>\*.vmdk \\backup-server\vmbackups\<vmname>\
  vmrun.exe start <path_to_.vmx>
}

There’s some more plumbing to be done, but once you have a working backup script you can schedule it or run it whenever you like. If you get your VM information from vmrun.exe list you don’t have to worry about adding more running VMs or anything. Hope that gets you started.