Zmanda Backup Server Appliance is a Vmware Virtual Machine with Amanda Enterprise 3.1.5 server images. It includes both Amanda server and client packages. All Amanda pre-requisites to perform file system backups to disk are installed. Additional packages might be required for backups of other applications/databases. For example: If you are backing up VMware ESX, you will need to install VMware vSphere VCLI (VMware-vSphere-CLI) on the ZBA. Please see Zmanda Application documentation for details.
Server backup appliances uses 32bit CentOS 5 distribution or 32bit Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 distribution.
There are two Vmware images for each distribution is available for download:
VMX format This image works on VMware ESX 3.5
OVA format This image works on VMware ESX 4.x and ESXi 4.x
Disk space requirements: The appliance performs backups to disk. It expects about 130GB for disk space in the Vmware data store to perform backups. The minimum space requirement for vmx format (thinly provisioned) is 1-2GB and for ova format is 130GB.
The default backup set is configured for backing up to disk. If you are planning to back up to tape changer, you will have to make the tape drives and changer visible to the ZBA.
If you are running ZBA on ESX 3.5, please see this VMware Knowlegebase article.
If you are running ZBA on ESX 4.x, please see this VMware Knowledgebase article.
After following instructions on the VMware KB article, you should see the tape changer and tape drive listed when you run the following command as root user on the ZBA.
# cat /proc/scsi/scsi
When you are configuring backups to Amazon S3, it is important to maintain correct time on the Zmanda Backup Appliance. Backups will fail if there is a time skew. Please follow VMware Knowledge base article on how to keep time on VMware.