Hi,

I was required to do a backup of a virtual machine that runs on vmware. The guest operating system is windows, and the host is windows too. I have to backup the whole directory of the virtual machine (say in linux it'll be in /var/lib/vmware/virtual machines/) to a linux server.

Initially I had done something like this:
- Schedule the windows on vm to shutdown (I use pstools with force flag) say at 1am.
- A backup script will run on the linux backup server at around 2am that will mount the directory on windows where the vm resides, tar it straight to the linux server and umount it.
- Schedule the vm to start at 5am.

While it works, am having a bad feeling running a force shutdown on the vm every single week for the backup. I can schedule a normal shutdown of course, but I don't think tthis will gurantee that the windows will eventually shutdown? Will it be safe enough if I use vmrun stop soft to shutdown the windows?

So, besides doing snapshot, what would be a better way to backup the virtual machine files (all the vmdk, vmx, etc.etc.)?

Any advice offered is appreciated. Thanks.