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Simon, After all those various virt providers you mentioned - I'm confused whether you're looking for backup solution or a local system that you admin - or whether it's a "cloud" offering (man, I hate that term...) Since there's no other replies with free/open solutions - which I'd be interested in myself - then I'd better just chip in with something I've used... So - with some intrepidation - I "recommend" Acronis (I never thought I'd see myself type that) for ESXi installations... You need a Management VM / PM to control all the backup schedules, etc, and then you push an agent on to each ESXi Host. The agent is actually a simple Linux VM - unfortunately it's dressed up to look like a WinXP VM if you ever access it (which you shouldn't need to). So, that agent quiesces the VMs on its host and backs them up for you. It can also deal with PMs if you have a mixed physical / virtual setup. Try it and see... Cheers, Steve -----Original Message----- From: list [mailto:list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Simon Waters Sent: 17 November 2015 00:51 To: list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [LUG] Virtual servers and snapshot backup Okay, looking to deploy a new virtual server (or maybe more). I've used Amazon AWS, Bytemark, Rackspace, VMWare.... In the past I used Flexiscale, and whilst they were the least reliable, they had the best user interface (if we ignore https://sig-io.nl/ where you just emailed Mark and said "make it so"). Flexiscale is now Flexiant, selling their cloud orchestration software, which looks cool in a 'you can get migrate away from other virtualisation solutions with lousy interfaces really easily kind of way' ;) My particular bugbear with all of them is backups. Even Flexiscale forced you to use the API to schedule a snapshot backup. AWS can do everything just learn to script the API.... Rackspace want a cloud agent. Seems simple to me, you own a server you need backups, the virtualisation software will do (with some coercion in some places) snapshots, probably copy on write. I want routine backups, I want to be able to back them up to a remote provider with some efficiency. No one seems to offer to do sensible automated backups. The best of those above in my view is Rackspace who want an agent on the server, but then let you schedule and manage it sensibly. Strictly agents are probably needed to quiesce the file systems for the point of backups, so AWS can probably be made to work with a local cron job to quiesce the system, and snapshot it, but it is still a fair bit of roll it yourself around sticking it in Amazon storage etc. Anyone seen a really clean backups solutions for virtual servers, bonus points if it works with encrypted volumes, and uses strong encryption appropriately to keep my data safe, and uses free software. Has to work with Debian Jessie (what else is there?). -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq