How to transfer files (GIGS in size) between ESX 3.0.1 or 3.0 server as an FTP client
A friend of mine asked me if I can sell my CCIE server to him for $1500. Normally I won’t sell it, rather keep it as a monument, after I passed all my lab using this server.
But after several requests, to keep friendship I finally agreed to sell my server. After that the challenge was that I had to take all virtual machine backup.
On last Friday I bought a 1 terabyte (TB) hard disk (for AUD $200) and tried transferring files using winscp. I couldn’t transfer those files because those were big.
So finally I had to install vsftp in the ESX server and make a softlink of my /vmfs to a ftp users home directory then download using “File zilla ftp client”
Hardware details: HP ML-580, Dual Xeon 3.0 processor, 4 gig RAM. Loaded with CCM pub/sub, unity and IPCC.
Here is the procedure:
- SSH to ESX server – issue ‘chkconfig iptables off’ , service iptables stop (its culprit)
- Download vsftpd-1.2.0-4.i386.rpm
- Copy vsftpd-1.2.0-4.i386.rpm to your ESX server
- SSH to your ESX server console using a root account (make sure in /etc/sshd/sshd_config has root account enabled else use below method)
- After logging in using a normal user, become the root user (su -)
- Install the FTP server rpm -ivh vsftpd-1.2.0-4.i386.rpm –nodeps
- vi /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf
- Change anonymous_enable=NO (for security)
- You need to add the following lines to force passive mode to only use ports 2050-5000.
pasv_min_port=2050
pasv_max_port=5000
- Start the FTP server with a service vsftpd start
- Create a user. Do not use ‘anonymous’ or ‘ftp‘.
User and Pass cannot contain symbols like @ (single quote)- adduser mybackups.
- passwd mybackups.
- To have the ftp server automatically start on boot, type:
chkconfig –level 3 vsftpd on - Remember you will probably have to change the permissions on the /vmfs/volume you are using as a FTP destination.
chmod 1777 /vmfs/volumes/(UUID of Folder)
You can also link the path to a simpler name, such as:
ln -s /vmfs/volumes/UUID-NAME/backups /backups
Then use just ‘/backups’ in the express configuration. - Use filezillaftp client to download the files from ESX server
Gotchas?
Make sure that you have NTFS or Ext2/3 file system where you are going to store the files.
I had FAT32 and it won’t copy more than 4 gig file size. It will come up with an error saying that no desk space. How stupid is this error message, after all I had 1TB of HDD and still got that message that can’t, copy the file, disk running out of space.
Here are the limitations:
fat16 – 2 gig max
fat32 – 4 gig max
NTFS – Above 2TB
EXT2/3 – 2 TB
That’s all.
Cheers, Push
Hi Push,
I don’t understand why would you use FTP when you have a built-in mechanism in VMware ESXi to backup all your files using datastore . I backed up around 30Gigs of data in less than an hour.I don’t think using ftp will make much of a difference to decrease that backup time.
I had ESX and not ESXi. both are different cattle of fish. ESXi runs hypervisor only.
push
Hi push,
I use esxi and I use datastore as well to download the vmware files.
Great post.. thanks for sharing 😀
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Thanks