After a painstaking few months with the fairly buggy release of vCenter 5.1 and new counterpart module called Single Sign On (how did this ever get past QA I will never know), there is finally light at the end of the tunnel.
If you were having trouble adding active directory users or groups via the vSphere client to manage your hosts via vCenter, it is likely you face the same issue with single sign on (SSO).
ESXi acts as a really flexible and powerful monster of an operating system which can easily divvy up your server’s physical hardware in to virtualised components. These components can then be shared among tens of virtual machines depending on how you’ve set things up.
Although flexible and powerful, I could not find any straight forward back-up guides for backing up my virtual machines.
Snapshots are in no way shape or form back-ups so that is out of the question. I did take a look at copying the VMs out of the data store either through the vSphere client or SSH but that is a bit messy.