Oct 2, 2020

VMWare : How To Enabled for Synology Active Backup for Business

 I believe anyone that uses a Synology product will or may be using of their plugin package called "Active Backup for Business". It's a FREE tools for you to do backup for Physical Desktops/Servers, Hyper-V, VMWare ESXi.

But how do you enabled the access from Synology to the ESXi server ? The steps are very simple and straighforward.

1. Login to the ESXi server and enable both the Secure Shell (SSH) and Console Shell services.

2. Next is to shutdown that VM Guest before performing the next step.

3. Still in the ESXi server, Right-Click the VM Guest --> Edit Settings.

4. Goto --> VM Options --> Advanced.

5. Click --> Edit Configurations.

6. Click --> Add Parameters.

7. Type-in the following configurations :

7.1 Parameter = ctkEnabled

7.2 Set the value = true

7.3 Parameter = scsi0:0.ctkEnabled

7.4 Set the value = true

Note : If the VM Guest is using an IDE HDD type then the parameter should be "ide0:0.ctkEnabled

Also whenever a new HDD was added to the VM Guest, the device will be assigned either "scsi0:1" or "scsi1:1", this assignment may varies per VM.

8. Now save the configurations and proceed to boot-up the VM.

9. After boot-up, you can double check the configurations by browsing the datastore, a new file will be created "[VM Name]-ctk.vmdk". This file will be used by Synology Active Backup for Business the access and identification of the backup.

As how to configure for the Active Backup for Business it will be for another post, but you can always refer to Synology website for tutorials.


!!! HAPPY COMPUTING !!!