How to backup VMWare Virtual Machines?

As you may already know - backing up virtual machines isn't a walk in the park. Actually, it is very much similar to usual backup process of any physical machine. However, VMWare has a nice tool called "VMware Consolidated Backup" which can do even online backups of virtual machines, without disrupting users and applications. Of course this tool isn't free. So, we are back at the begining of this story - how to backup virtual machines.

There are few ways to do manual backup of virtual machines which can then bi scripted into a semi-automatic backup or automatic backup if you whish. The down side of this approach is that you have downtime of virtual machine when doing backup, but in most cases I find this acceptable.

We are using VMWare server 2.0 platform for our virtual machines. There are few requirements in order to do this. First, you need to familiarize yourself with vmrun command line tool. Vmrun is used for managing virtual machines from command line. This and other Vmware tools are by default located in c:\Program Files\VMWare\VMware Server\.

This is what I use for "soft" stopping virtual machine SPWFE1.domain.local located at E_DRIVE datastore of VMWare Server named VM.domain.local. I am using local administrator user context for running this command i.e. user:admin with password:wordxxxx

From command prompt run: "vmrun -T server -h https://vm.domain.local:8333/sdk -u admin -p wordxxxx stop "[E_DRIVE] spwfe1\spwfe1.domain.local.vmx" soft"

This command, shutsdown virtual machine spwfe1.domain.local after ending all processes.

Now, we need to go to next step, which is copying the virtual machine to another location i.e. making backup of the virtual machine. In order to do that - I use xcopy command to copy folder content to another location.

After copying is done, we can start the virtual machine by running command "vmrun -T server -h https://vm.domain.local:8333/sdk -u admin -p wordxxxx start "[E_DRIVE] spwfe1\spwfe1.domain.local.vmx"

The final thing, in order to automate this, you should organize stop, copy and startup scripts into different scripts and use either windows AT command or Scheduled Tasks to schedule starting of these scripts.

Sharepoint system architecture

When thinking about sharepoint architecture - you got to first think about the platform architecture and system design. Nowdays, virtualization technology is something we all need to think about when planning system design of any kind. That goes also for sharepoint architecture.

Sharepoint, as we all know is Microsoft's content management system and collaboration tool for groupwares. As such, it is used very often as company's Intranet or Internet presence platform. Since Sharepoint allows you to distribute it's components through many hardware boxes in order to load balance requests - it can be used in so called multi-layerd architecture also known as multi-tier architecture. In multi-tier architecture - Sharepoint can be installed in load-balancing and fail-over environment to provide better performance and high availability.

So, ideal Sharepoint architecture is comprised of multiple hardware boxes serving in multi-tier architecture. Virtualization technology fits well in this multi-box multi-tier architecture. There is only one rule you need to know about - virtualization of database servers is not something you should do or use in production environment. The main reason is because DBs often do a lot I/O disk activity which doesn't perform so well in virtual environment. On the other hand - it is ok to have virtualized DB server in testing environment.

What to use as Sharepoint platform?

During the 2009, the year of the global recession, there were not many operating systems released. This means that, if you are thinking of installing Sharepoint - you will probably have to choose one of two available Microsoft server operating systems - either Windows 2003 Server or Windows 2008 Server. Since, Windows 2003 Server (R2) version is on the market for some time - I would recommend that you pick Windows 2003 Server as your platform for Sharepoint. Although, Windows 2008 is better option in some cases (especially) because of its improvements in the field of security, Windows 2008 has some miles to do on Sharepoint road to prove itself. Anyway - any of the two operating systems is good option nowdays. One thing you need to keep in mind is that Windows 2008 will be fully supported by Microsoft in years to come i.e. Windows 2008 mainstream support will be retired on 7/9/2013 (extended support retirement on 7/10/2018). Situation with Windows 2003 (R2) is a bit different - mainstream support retirement on 7/13/2010, extended support retirement on 7/14/2015. For more information on support policy, go to Microsoft Support Lifecycle Policy FAQ.

One other thing is that you really need to think about (1st)Sharepoint virtualization and (2nd)going 64-bit with Sharepoint. There are many benefits of Sharepoint virtualization. Virtualization gives you much flexibility in system architecture because of the nature of virtualized platform.