Diskpart

This was taken from the Microsoft website.  A customer asked how this command would work in VMWare.  I tried it and it worked just like usual.

Overview
Servers: 2 Dell 1420SC with 500 Gigs per server SATA Drives (250 Gigs Ea)
Hot Drive: Maxtor IDE USB External Drive
Plan: Complete Virtual Image Backups to an external drive.
Downtime: 1 hour per 60 Gigs if you are using SCSI 320 or USB 2.0

Easy Way:
Lab01: FAT 32 File System.
This is the easiest way to copy the VM images to the external hard drive. Both Windows and Red Hat Enterprise 4 know this file system and will mount it with no issues. The only issue is that FAT32 will only allow 32 Gigs per partition. If security is needed this is not the way to go.

Notice:
The testing done on this project was time consuming. However, I would rather corrupt my test servers than the production ones. I have found that if the databases are small enough it is better to dismount the databases and stop IIS. (really do not need to stop IIS but since it runs OWA it will not hurt). Once that is done just copy the files in the MDBDATA folder to another folder. I have tested with NTBackup and I have lost data everytime I did a restore.
With the databases cleanly shutdown and IIS off I could copy and paste all I wanted and I do not lose anything in the databases. My next test will be with Symantec Veritas 10d. I will do an Exchange Data restore and a whole server restore. I save this one for my last.

Test Layout (Test Run01)
Drive Image XML http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm
VM Server runing XP Pro.
Created 2 Virtual Disk. One for backup and second one for restore. 3 Disk Total
C: XP Pro Boot
E: Backup Disk
F: Restore Disk

Backup to Drive E
No big issues with this. Just read the screens.

Restore:
I had to boot off the CD and do a fixmbr from the XP Recovery Console.
It does have the install for XP Pro on Restore disk and it does ask me for a password to access disk.
Rebooted and it did not work.
Fixboot did not work unless c: was included.

Backup Exec, Windows 2000, and Red Hat ES3

Six months of Veritas 10 and now Symantec 10d backups. I am running under Linux RHES3 as a host with the guess as Server 2000. Like all backups I had some issue but non related to the virtual server.

Using the current technologies with VMWare, Windows, and Cisco, it is possible to have a live backup at an alternate location. The link below show a demo Viso layout of Windows 2003 Doman Controllers and SQL running a cutomers location and being repicated over a T1 to a hosting company. This aritcle will be update from time to time to get results of T1 usage and how VMWare performs.

Demo Layout