Esxi VM's backup using Duplicati

Hello

I would like to backup Esxi VM’s through Duplicati, Is it possible? Is it in Duplicati development road map?

Thanks in advance.

No, it cannot natively back up VMs running on ESX. Duplicati is really designed to back up LOCAL data, and as such it should be installed on the system that has the data you wish to protect. There’s no support for running Duplicati directly on an ESX host.

I’d probably recommend Veeam.

Would putting Duplicati on each VM to do its usual file backup process do what’s desired?

The request is vague. Another question would be what paid ESXi software (if any) is used.

I don’t run ESXi, but from web research, free ESXi has limitations (including using Veeam).

There is some products like VM Explorer from microfocus.com that provide backup via a web interface working on local( remote ) port 444

That’d work if your goal is to protect files inside the VMs. For image level backups (full VM) then it’s insufficient…

Yes there are lots of ways to do image level / full VM backups. Veeam is a very popular one, but there are definitely others. Duplicati doesn’t do it though.

Yes, I know Veeam products, I am google for light ( Server Resource ) solutions.
Thank you

If you have insane bandwidth and an unlimited storage service you can probably script an OVA export to a specific directory then backup that directory using Duplicati.

Are you running a licensed vSphere?
Or a licensed vCenter?
Or just the free hypervisor?

I am using Licensed Esxi

No vCenter? Just one host?
Looking for the lowest cost solution?

Yes, No vCenter and Just one host.

Veeam Community Edition may be enough for what you need. You get 10 VM protection with a bunch of features. Anything past 10 can only do ad-hoc backups using VeeamZIP.

Veeam is only as good as the storage you use for a repository. If you have VERY lax recovery time objectives you can use almost anything for a backup repository. Then you can use Duplicati to perform file level backups of those backup files. If this is what you’re trying to accomplish, I’d recommend that you do incrementals with an active full every week or month (depending on how important the VM is and how many recovery points you’re willing to risk). I’ve had fulls go corrupt due to my crappy storage targets. There is nothing you can do. You just lose the data and the recovery points. So fulls every now and again. Synthetic fulls are neat but a waste of compute and time if your target isn’t formatted to ReFS.

They recently unlocked a ton of features:

If you have a ton of money, I like what I saw in Rubrik.
Another solution is Cohesity.
The benefits of these solutions are that they cover the software and hardware for backing up. They race each other on features outside of VM backup, but the winner isn’t usually the consumer as these solutions get deployed before they’re ready.
But these are 10k+ dollar up to 100k+ products with support and licensing renewals required for the life of the solution.

2 Likes

Thank you for your recommendation.
I know Veeam, Cohesity was new for me and must to check it.