Transferring / Archiving ESXi 4 VM into LTO-4 tape drive

Use a third party product or vmware consolidated backup to backup the VM's to a location that is accessible to the backup solution. You then set your backup software to backup to tape all the files in that location

this is very high level. Maybe if you give me an idea of what backup software you use then maybe i can elaborate more or maybe even offer another solution

ah, thanks for your reply man.
for the VM backup I'm using Veeam Backup and Replication 4.1
for the physical and tape backup management I'm using Backup Exec 2010 R2

Backup Exec 2010 has a licensed option that will backup your VM's directly to tape. It uses the VMWare consolidated backup infrastructure. This is the easiest way to do it depending on your budget. Is this an option?

using Freeware VMware with helper script i guess it is the way to go here, since I've spent the budget on the Veeam Backup already.

The way we did it pre backup exec VMWare license was we had VMWare Consolidated Backup installed on the backup exec server (free)

We created a job in backup exec that had a pre-command which run a script that called the VCB. The VCB would backup the VM's to a storage location that was visible to the backup server and the ESX Host (this was a SAN LUN)

The backup job was simply configured to backup files in storage location.

A post command then deleted the backup freeing up space for the next backup. This worked flawlessly.

Advantage of this was the entire backup was controlled from one application. If the VCB failed then the backup would not run and an alert would be sent to us for action.

There is plenty of info on the VMWare site about VCB and Backup Exec is supported with it. Setup is easy enough though you do need to modify a few config files for it to work.

If you decide to look at this deeper let me know as i can help with the config, just need to dust off the old doco's

Cool, that is just what i need :-)
so in my case i can start to use the batch VCB v1.5update2 framework (the latest VCB from VMware).

it would be good if there is a script example and what to put into the backup exec.
many thanks man for your reply.

I can provide an example but unfortunately I am away from work. Will post it for you as soon as I can ( maybe tomorrow) it's 11pm here

thanks man, sametime here almost 11 PM here.
let us have rest and then catch up later.

I really appreciate your help.

yes it works man !
that'll do.

thanks !