Hi guys. We are thinking of a way to snapshot Vmware ESX luns, mount them on a linux box and back them up. Does anybody know if a linux distribution (Fedora/Gentoo/Suse) can read vmfs file system?

Thanks

I am not sure exactly what you are asking: but I have no problem grabbing any type of file using Samba, however reading such files may pose a serious problem. I am still not sure why you need to read them, it appears to me that you are only using the snapshots as a back-up and would only actually need to read them if you restore onto the VMware ESX server.

I use a Maxtor 12GB One-touch USB2/Firewire external drive to store suspended and snapshots of my various distros. Although I have less crashes and no BSOD since I am no longer developing an accounting package on SQL Server on NT4.

HTH

well...at present there are no backup agents for the customized linux kernel running in Vmware ESX. So we are currently backing up our Vmware guests as if there were physical boxes...over the network. We are looking a san based backup, where we can pause the virtual guests, take a snapshot of that lun, split it ...mount the snapshot on the linux host (if it could read vmfs) and then back it up with the backup agent (CommVault) running on the linux box. We are actually getting ready to try this very soon. It's worth a shot.