The Advisers Group

Ok, so you've setup ghettoVCB on your ESXi or vSphere Hypervisor to backup your VM's but your sick of logging into the server and running the command manually. Don't fret, there is a solution. 

This solution requires that you have SSH enabled on your ESXi Server, you have previously configured ESXi backups with ghettoVCB. If you have not done this yet. Please look at how to complete these tasks in the ESXi Tutorial section of this site. 

Many of you are familiar with Putty which is great Free SSH program. The Putty developer also has a program called Plink. Plink is a command shell interface into Putty that can make this possible.

First, download Plink and Putty from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html.

Now gather some information to create the batch file that we will call with Plink. I've included reference information below.

Path to Putty & Plink.exe: c:\putty\plink.exe
ESXi user:root
ESXi Server Host or IP: 192.168.1.100
ESXi root password: ESXiRocks01
Path to ghettoVCB.sh: /vmfs/volumes/DataStore1/backup
Path to list of VMs to backup: /vmfs/volumes/DataStore1/ backup/vm-list

Now that the information is gathered it's time to create the batch file that will run. We do this by taking all of the information above and adding it to a new notepad document.

c:\putty\plink.exe This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . 1.100 -pw "nohup ./vmfs/volumes/DataStore/backup/ghettoVCB.sh -f /vmfs/volumes/DataStore1/backup/vm-list"

What the bath file does is login to the ESXi server using root, nohup starts the ghettoVCB script to continue running even after Plink.exe has closed the connection. GhettoVCB calls the file that contains the list of VM's that we want to backup.

There are several variation on this command line.
If you are not concerned about logging out of the session simply don't include "nohup" in the batch file. If you would like to create a log add

" > /logfilepath/backuplog.txt"

to the end of the file. Make sure that /logfilepath/ exists on your server. To keep it with the ghettoVCB files utilize the same path as your ghettoVCB script. In the case above it would be

/vmfs/volumes/Datastore1/backup/backuplog.txt 

The whole command would be

c:\putty\plink.exe This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . 1.100 -pw " ./vmfs/volumes/DataStore/backup/ghettoVCB.sh -f /vmfs/volumes/DataStore1/backup/vm-list >  /vmfs/volumes/Datastore1/backup/backuplog.txt "

Save the file on your computer. I saved mine as "c:\esxibackup\vibackup.bat"

Now simply use the task scheduler, located in administrative tools,  in Windows to schedule the batch file to run whenever you want your Virtual Machines backed up.

Alternatively, if you are running Linux, install the Plink package, use your favorite text editor to create the script, give it the appropriate permissions, setup a cron job to run the command at a specified time.

ESXi 4.x requires a much stronger password than 3.5 did. If you are doing an upgrade you may not notice the difference until you go to change your password. If you are doing a new install, you will notice pretty quickly that it requires a very strong password.

Many will want to modify the password settings to make the password standards for ESXi 4.x weaker or in some cases stronger.

Prior to making any changes there are some things that you need to know. First, changes to this file will take effect immediately and will not require a reboot. Second, the sticky bit for the file is enabled, so changes will be backed up into the system configuration backup file for the host and you will not need to reapply this fix at every reboot. Third and most importantly, this is not a supported change.