I need to complete some further testing to verify that this all works in the longterm but so far I'm very happy with this completely free solution. Lastly as an extra layer of protection I've setup CrashPlan within each vm to backup at a file level to our Amazon EC3 instance. I can also directly start any of my vm's from the backup drives directly by mounting then on my MacBook and starting them through VMware fusion, this takes no more than five minutes which is ideal in a crunch. Using one of those drives I can complete a full restore to a bare metal esxi server in less than 2 hours, which is more than acceptable to me. I've then scripted Unraid to rsync those backups to each of 5 external drives which I'll rotate off-site. I went with a free solution based on using a separate Unraid box as my backup destination for the Xsibackup script. Does anyone have a suggestion as to a good, inexpensive NAS device that works well with ESXi and NFS mounts? My Western Digital NAS is painfully show to do backups, I think this is likely because it's old and only supports NFS v3 rather that v4. Ideally I would like to rotate 5 USB drives off-site, each with the data required to rebuild my infrastructure.Ģ. I would like to implement off-site backups and I don't know how best to go about this. I have a recovery plan that get's me up and running in 4 hours so long as I have the NAS to hand.ġ.

This all works great, the NAS contains several weeks of fully bootable VM's that I can easily revert to in case of a disaster. I've installed and configured XSIbackup (free) which is scheduled via cron to creates hot backups of my VM's to a old NAS device (My Book World Edition 1TB). Using ESXi 6, I have 3 VM's (all linux servers) taking care of AD, file sharing and web-development for my small business - this all works great and is costing me very little as I'm using a retired HP server (32GB / Quadcore) with hardware RAID1 and couple of 500GB SSD's. Ultimately I have a working system but I can't figure out how to add off-site backups the equation. I've been virtualizing on the cheap and have had great success, but there are holes in my knowledge and I was hoping you guys could offer some advice.

Vmware esxi 6 mybook as datastore