Using VMWare to Simplify System Backups

Oh, the drudgery of performing system backups. We all know that we’re supposed to do it and that we’ll someday get burned if we don’t, but many of us still don’t take the time to perform full system backups regularly. Even if you are diligent enough to create a full system backup, restoring an OS that’s gone belly-up is often time-consuming and tedious. But if you’re running your OS as a virtual machine within VMWare performing a full system backup is as easy as copying off a small handful of files and recovering from a failure is as easy as copying them back. (If you’re not familiar with VMWare you get take a look at my earlier post about what VMWare is and how it works.)

You could always use imaging software to back up the OS — that would certainly make restoring the backup a lot easier — but what happens if there’s some sort of hardware problem with the machine you’re trying to restore? Having a recent backup image doesn’t help if you’ve lost the processor on your server and your website is down. You could try recovering your backed up image to a different machine but there’s no guarantee that the OS would be able to straighten itself out easily. Using VMWare you could be back in business on a different server (or workstation) quickly. The new server doesn’t even need to be running the same OS as the failed server, it just needs to be have the VMWare player installed.

Remember that the guest operating systems running within VMWare are running in a kind of abstracted environment. They don’t see the host server’s CPU per se — they see an abstracted version of the host server’s CPU. It’s the same with all of the hardware on the host. That same abstracted layer is in place whether the host is running Windows or Linux. Because that abstraction layer is consistent you can create a virtual machine on one host OS and run it on another. Depending on how you’ve set up the guest OS even the IP address could be the same. From the guest OS’s perspective nothing is different.

Using VMWare to host your operating system makes for a simplified backup and recovery strategy. Just copy your guest OS’s files to a different machine, fire up the VMWare player, and pick up just where your backup left off. When your original host is back up and running you can just reverse the process.

How’s that for a simple and flexible backup and recover strategy?

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