How many times happens we need to copy files back and forth from the virtualisation Hosts? Probably too many times. Especially considering when running a homelab where maybe there is a constant need to rebuild some Hosts, virtual machines and applications.
In the case of VMware the operations to browse and upload files are very easy and intuitive. Maybe more for the latter when it works. And I’m referring to the client integration plug-in that was not always working due to Adobe Flash, Certificates or other dependancies. Surely the “C” or fat client was always working. But these are not an option anymore with the latest versions of VMware. Now everything is based on HTML5 and the overall experience is just priceless!
Back in the days Veeam released a very popular product called FastSCP. The reason why it became so popular are evident and everyone loves the idea to interact with the vSphere Hosts without opening and managing SSH connections to the Hosts.
Well Veeam FastSCP is baked in Veeam Backup console and still brings all the goodness it was known for:
- fast transfers using full network capacity
- traffic compression
- empty blocks removal for efficient transfers
- automatic SSH channel creation
- dedicated username and password generation for each transfer
- no need to put the Host in maintenance mode before the file transfer
This is living the dream. And FastSCP is now built-in into Veeam Backup & Replication console. So why not use it?
Without much ado, in the next screenshots the steps to quickly copy files with Veeam console.
How to use Veeam console to copy files
From the Veeam console let’s open the Files view. In this case we’ll copy a big file like the Exchange ISO. This file is currently located on a “Veeam Managed Server”. In this particular case the machine is running the VMware Backup Proxy role. Let’s select the file and hit on Copy from the ribbon.
Let’s navigate now to desired target location. In this example the local storage on the VMware vSphere Host. Upon selection of the target location we can simply hit Paste from the ribbon.
The file transfer will now start showing the progress as well.
This ISO file is now copied to the Host. The process is very quick also considering I have a standard Gigabit network between the Host and the virtual machine where the file is sitting.
There’s more we can do depending on the selected files. In case of text files we can also edit them directly from the Veeam console. Pretty handy when working for example with vmx and vmtx files. Everything happening from the same Veeam console.
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