Unfortunately, I was the one who suggested VMware as a way to handle my company's growth while restricted by our limited 2-rack closet space. Well, my boss trusted my judgement and ordered a $10k, 64-bit, HP power-beast of a server on which we now have 5 VMs idling under ESX3.5.

Only then, did the backup challenge hit me. Anything leaving the host's teamed gigabit NICs is going to choke the VMs, so I can't consider that.

Since we have absolutely no plan (or budget) for going to SAN in the forseeable future, I came up with this backup scenario and would like feedback from other people on its potential viability in the face of our obvious bandwidth limitations.

First of all, we use Acronis True Image to take full volume backups of each of our servers every night. It has worked great and saved us on several occasions with our physical servers.

My idea is to:

1. Set up a "proxy" VM to mount an external SCSI drive on the host (assuming this is possible!)
2. Install Acronis True Image on each other VM
3. Have Acronis dump backup images to the "proxy" VM's attached storage

I know this kills a lot of the elegance of virtualization, but we really don't have the budget to add a second ESX server as a replication partner.

Does this sound like it would work out, or would it be too difficult to mount a host's external SCSI drive?

Thanks,
-Derek