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Acronis Advanced Backup for Windows Server inside a VM

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I have a VMware host with an unknown root password which is not being backed up regularly .  All of the storage is local so I can't access the host via vCenter.  I would feel much more comfortable if I could copy the VMs onto another host before reloading the ESXi OS.  My first thought was to load Acronis Advanced Backup for Windows Server onto each Windows VM to get an backup/image like I do on my physical servers.  Would this create a functional VM image? Has anyone tried this?

 

 

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If you take an offline image of each VM, it should work - regarldess of Acronis product.  Basically mount your offline bootable recovery media (.iso would work best in this case) and boot the VM's into it (F2 usually).  Then take a full virtual disk image and save it somewhere.  You should be able to restore ina similar fashion again.

As a precaution, I would also copy or backup your VM files as well. Make sure you do this why the VM systems are completely offline though.  

Best yet, if you can stand up a new (or test) ESXI host, then you can try to recover the image and see how it goes (do it with networking disabled though on the VM so you don't end up with a hostname/ip conflict).  You could try it via the Acronis image recovery and/or by copying the VM files over and seeing if you can get them to load that way.