Forum ©XSIBackup: ©VMWare ©ESXi Backup Software

Hi,

From another post I learned that backup speed of xsibackup could be increased if the backup destination is addressed via SSH rather than via NFS.

Therefore, I added the provided xsibackup public key to the authorized_keys of the backup destination system at the appropriate backup user.

Additionally, I ran ./xsibackup --link-srv=<ip_backup>:<port_backup> --backup-as=<user_backup> which caused the following output:

The local RSA key has already been added to the authorized_keys file at <ip_backup>:<port_backup>.
There is no need to add it again, you should be able to connect with XSIBackup to <ip_backup>:<port_backup> without any password.

In my xsibackup command, I defined options --backup-as=<user_backup> --backup-point=<ip_backup>:<port_backup>:/path/to/backup/directory, but it failed:

2019-07-14T23:41:09|  Backup user is: backup
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2019-07-14T23:41:09|  Backup program is: onediff
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2019-07-14T23:41:11|  Remote OpenSSH version is: 7.4
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2019-07-14T23:41:11|  Negotiated Cipher (server->client): aes128-ctr
2019-07-14T23:41:11|  Negotiated Cipher (client->server): aes128-ctr
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2019-07-14T23:41:11|  Service OpenSSH ready at server <ip_backup>:<port_backup>
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2019-07-14T23:41:11|  Permission denied. Please use --link-srv=remote-IP:remote-port argument to exchange keys.
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In another try, I installed the private/public key provided with xsibackup also as the keys for ESXi root on the host where xsibackup is installed. I verified that I could login at the backup system as <backup_user> without entering any credentials.

I am stuck at the moment, as all my manual actions work to access the backup system as the backup user without entering any credentials.

Is there any hint, especially as how to debug?

Best regards,
Peter

Hi,

Is there any drawback when scheduling regular backups on a virtual machine via xsitools and also, probably in a less frequent interval, scheduling backups on the same virtual machine via onediff or xsidiff?

I assume that the snapshot mechanism used by onediff does only interfer with xsitools to the extent that the snapshot file will be stored in a xsitools date directory for each single differential backup instead of being deduplicated in the data directory. However, due to the short time interval between creating the snapshot and processing the xsitools based directory, the snapshot will be very small.

Furthermore, I do not assume that xsidiff somehow negatively interfers with xsitools.

Or would it be recommendable to chain the backups, i.e. perform onediff first and then process xsitools on the onediff copy of the virtual machine? The approach described in this post looks promising:

[url=https://33hops.com/xsibackup-pro-onediff-backup-retention-policy.html]How to use OneDiff and still keep a historic set of backups.[/url]

Up to now, I refrained from doing so because of backuping up to a Synology NAS which suffers from gaining full root access. I was a bit scared about executing xsibackup directly on the Synology NAS because of issues around the root access, please see post:

[url=https://33hops.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=109]Backing up to Synology NAS (rsync)[/url]

Therefore, I made the Synology NAS locally available to the ESXi server via NFS and avoided executing xsibackup with xsitools in a chained setup.

However, the Synology NAS has enough memory so that I could run a VM in which I have full root access and where I can access the disks of the Synology NAS. This leads to my question: Are there very good reasons to perform xsitools directly on the Synology NAS once the onediff copy has been transferred to the Synology NAS?

Furthermore, I am not sure whether the NFS connection is the best choice. Would it be more recommendable to use an ssh connection to my Synology NAS like the xsibackup manual suggests when connecting to another ESXi Server (which the Synology NAS not is):

--backup-point
B) Full path in a remote ESXi host by using the following syntax: --backup-point="IP.OF.REMOTE.SERVER:PORT:/full/path/todatastore"

Best regards,
Peter