A year ago I decided it was time to learn some VM. I went out and got a Dell R710 and installed the Dell optimized ESXi 6.0 software on it. I then went on to create 4 VM's, (2) Win 10, (1) UBuntu 18 and (1) Win 7.
I create new vm's from time to time for certain projects, but for the most part this is my environment. Most of the time I only have a single win7 VM powered on that run a specific app for my network.
All my VM's and ESXi install sits on a 4 drive raid5 setup. I boot from a USB KEY installed inside the R710.
In the event the USB KEY or the RAID should become unrecoverable I could restore my environment without too much hastle. To be honest I've forgotten a lot of the customization I did when I first set up the environment so being able to easily recover would be really nice.
I suppose for the USB KEY I could just take a snapshot of that using some kind of iso making software. That would allow me to restore the usb key quickly should it fail
I see there is free software to backup VM's (Veem). Should i use that to backup each VM?
What about ESXi itself? What's the best way to get that backed up? I'm trying to protect myself should my USB Boot Key and Raid5 array go south without having to reinstall and reconfigure all of ESXi (which is now fuzzy in my mind).
Thanks,
Roveer
