safekeeping

Overview

Safekeeping is an online backup tool for VMware vSphere. There are two way to use Safekeeping

1. by command line using safekeeping-cmd
2. by Soap WebService using safekeeping-cxf daemon

Common features between cmd and cxf:

1. Generation base repository.
2. Support for Virtual Machine, Improved Virtual Disk, vApp and K8s (experimental).
3. vCenter Tag support and management.
4. Archive Compression.
5. Archive Encryption
6. Multi repository target support (AWS S3,Azure, File System, and more to come).
7. Restore to a New Virtual Machine new vApp or a new Improved Virtual Disk.
8. Full Recovery of a Virtual Machine and VAPP with identity (UUID and other metadata).
9. Support VM and VAPP vApp property(OVF).
10. Support for encrypted VM and IVD.
11. Support for Storage Profile.
12. Support for VM implementing Microsoft VBS.
13. VMware Cloud on AWS and FedRamp support.
14. Kubernetes backup support (work in progress).
15. Full and incremental backup
16. Data dedup on the fly
17. Virtual full backup - forever incremental (create a full backup generation directly on the repository)

safekeeping-cmd Features

1. Command-line Interface, Interactive mode, and batch mode.
2. Single user
3. single thread
4. Support scripts
5. Extended command support for any entity on vCenter (more or less like powercli)
6. Works on Windows and Linux

safekeeping-cxf Features

1. Soap Web Service
2. Multi concurrent users with different logins
3. authentication based on vSphere PSC or IVDM
4. multiThreads operations
5. multi targets supports on the same sessions (ex backup to 2 different S3 buckets)
6. Rich SOAP Api
7. Works on Windows and Linux

Try it out

Prerequisites

CentOS 7.x with the following packages:

• open-vm-tools
• wget
• java-1.8.0-openjdk
• gcc
• zip
• gcc-c++
• make
• unzip

sudo yum install open-vm-tools wget java-1.8.0-openjdk  gcc zip gcc-c++ make unzip

Note: Other distributions should work fine

Windows (any) with the following packages:

• powershell
• java-1.8.0-openjdk
• Visual Studio 2017,2019 or 2022

Build

• Extract the Safekeeping source tar file or sincronize from this GIT deposit
• Download the Virtual Disk Development Kit and copy on the files on safekeeping/jdisklib/"OS-type"/vddk

Build the VDDK Wrapper

on Windows

cd safekeeping\jdisklib\windows 

Copy any VDDK library you want to use inside the safekeeping\jdisklib\windows\vddk directory

To build the VDDK wrapper use

• with VisualStudio 2017 build-2017.cmd
• with VisualStudio 2019 build-2019.cmd
• with VisualStudio 2022 build-2022.cmd

on Linux

cd ./safekeeping/jdisklib/linux

Copy any VDDK library you want to use inside the ./safekeeping/jdisklib/linux/vddk directory

To build the VDDK wrapper use: ./buildVddkLibraries.sh

Build Java code

Important JAVA supported versions are 8.0.345,11.0.16 or greater. Java 12 and doesn't work.

Import the project on Eclipse

cd safekeeping
prepare.cmd <java_version>  
gradlew eclipse 

on Windows

cd safekeeping
prepare.cmd <java_version>  
gradlew installDist 

on Linux

cd safekeeping
./prepare.sh <java_version>  
./gradlew installDist 

<java_version> 8 jdk1.8 9 jdk1.9 10 jdk10 11 jdk11

Gradle main tasks

Application tasks

• run - Runs this project as a JVM application

Build tasks

• build - Assembles and tests this project.
• clean - Deletes the build directory.

safekeeping-cmd and safekeeping-cxf only tasks

• deb - Safekeeping Installation. - Create a deb file (requires Debian/Ubuntu)
• dmg - Safekeeping Installation. - (requires MacOS )
• msi - Safekeeping Installation. - (requires Windows and https://wixtoolset.org/ )
• rpm - Safekeeping Installation. - (requires ReadHat/Centos )
• installDist - Safekeeping Installation. - Create the installation directory

Run

safekeeping-cxf

Run the webservice in interactive mode using port 8080 for HTTP and 8043 for HTTPS

safekeeping-cxf -port 8080 -secure 8043 -interactive

safekeeping-cmd

To run in interactive mode

safekeeping
or 
/opt/vmware/safekeeping/safekeeping

To execute a command

safekeeping <command> <options>

For example to run a backup

safekeeping backup vm:myTestVM

Help

If you are looking for help, the following configure command will display a list of help options:

safekeeping --help

Documentation

Check the wiki for safekeeping-cmd

Blogs Articles

Cormac Hogan Blog

Directory Contents

Directories

• safekeeping-cmd
  • Safekeeping Command Line version
• safekeeping-cxf
  • Safekeeping SOAP Web Service daemon version
• safekeeping-core
  • Core backup tool library written with Java
• jdisklib
  • Native interface for VDDK written with C++ using VDDK library.
• jvix
  • Java wrapper for jdisklib native library
• safekeeping-common
  • Java common library used by the project
• safekeeping-core-ext
  • Library used by the safekeeping-cmd to deal with: IVD, snapshots, etc.
• safekeeping-external
  • Wrapper of the internal class. Used by safekeeping-cfx for reflection
• jopt-simple
  • Modified jopt-simple parsing command line library nssm
  • Updated NSSM - the Non-Sucking Service Manager (support Visual Studio 2017 and 2019) PowerShell
  • Safekeeping SAPI cmd-let
• lib
  • Support files
• jar
  • Java jar files required by Safekeeping
• doc
  • Documentation.
• sample_scripts
  • Sample scripts to be used with Safekeeping
• nfs-client
  • NFS library DEPRECATED

Files

• LICENSE.txt
  • BSD-2 License file.
• open_source_licenses.txt
  • Open source License file.
• README.md
  • This file.
• VERSION
  • Safekeeping version number
• build.gradle
  • Gradle master build script
• settings.gradle
  • Gradle settings file

Contributing

The safekeeping project team welcomes contributions from the community. Before you start working with safekeeping, please read our Developer Certificate of Origin. All contributions to this repository must be signed as described on that page. Your signature certifies that you wrote the patch or have the right to pass it on as an open-source patch. For more detailed information, refer to CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

BSD-2 License