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AndyR8939
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esXpress Backup on ESXi 4.1 ?

Recently our company purchased a whole ESXi setup (3x HP DL360 servers, HP P4300 iSCSI SAN etc) which we have running fine. I wans't involved in the specing of this (despite being the IT person) as they wanted it done by project person here instead.....

Anyway, we tried installing ESX4 which is what the plan was, but because they have no local storage except a 4gb flash card, we couldn't install ESX. Instead, I managed to install ESXi 4.1 fine no worries as this is the way VMWare is going now anyway.

Now the problem is this. Part of what they bought here was esXpress Backup. Now this only works on ESX because of the service console which prior to 4.1, ESXi didn't have, but in 4.1 it does have a Service Console of sorts, but I still can't install it.

Any ideas?

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gfredette
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In case you weren't aware, but PHD has backup solutions for ESX1 and Vsphere. It takes advantage of VMware's vStorage API and enable Changed Block Tracking to increase the speed of your backups also, and has source-side deduplication and compression which occur before the data leaves the host. This reduces the network impact and providing an ideal solution for backup over distributed networks and WAN environments.

George Fredette

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khughes
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While this would probably be better posted on their forums, www.phdvirtual.com they supposably have a working version of esXpress that will backup ESXi and it should be slated for release sometime this year or early next year. To my knowledge they don't have a GA release of esXpress that will backup ESXi hosts.

-- Kyle

"RParker wrote: I guess I was wrong, everything CAN be virtualized "

-- Kyle "RParker wrote: I guess I was wrong, everything CAN be virtualized "
AndyR8939
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Thanks, I did post on there forum actually and got a similar response, so thought I'd post here just in case someone had figured a way round it.

Guess I need to find a free tool to do a basic backup until then.

Thx,

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khughes
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If you search the forums here there are some very large threads regarding ESXi and backups. But yes it looks like until they release it you will have to find out some other options for backing up your ESXi hosts

-- Kyle

"RParker wrote: I guess I was wrong, everything CAN be virtualized "

-- Kyle "RParker wrote: I guess I was wrong, everything CAN be virtualized "
AndyR8939
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Thanks for the help. Will get back to searching Smiley Happy

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petedr
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Andy,

I saw your post on our boars as well so I will post what I said there here as well.

We will releasing the next generation release of PHD Virtual backup (esXpress) by the end of this year. It is based on the same architecture that our recent XenServer release is.

Right now we are in the alpha phase of the ESXi support release and will be starting the beta program in about a month. Based on the success of the beta program we will set the GA release.

This is a video which shows the ESXi solution working in our labs and we also showed live demos at the recent VMworld show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x27qHrBLy_A

Pete@PHD Virtual

www.phdvirtual.com, makers of PHD Virtual Backup for Vmware and Xen Server, formally esXpress

www.thevirtualheadline.com www.liquidwarelabs.com
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dsoltesz
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Have you considered boot from SAN. We boot some of our hosts from SAN and it works fine. Of course you can't use software iSCSI for this, so I'm assuming you have an HBA card in your systems connected to either FC or iSCSI.

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AndyR8939
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Did think about Boot from SAN, but once we found out that VMWare were pushing ESXi as the main now, and this installed fine straight onto the Flash card, we thought we'd just go with that.

I didn't spec the backup solution, so just though esXpress would work fine with ESXi 4.1 as it had a version of the service console, so by the time we realised it wouldn't it was too late.

Oh well, guess I'll have to figure something else out for now.

Pete - Thanks for the info. Do you know if we can upgrade our current professional license to the ESXi version when it comes out?

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petedr
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Andy,

You should check with our sales group to confirm for sure on licensing but I believe if you currently have a valid license with current support you should be able to go to the ESXi version.

Pete@PHD Virtual

www.phdvirtual.com, makers of PHD Virtual Backup for Vmware and Xen Server, formally esXpress

www.thevirtualheadline.com www.liquidwarelabs.com
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petedr
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Andy,

Following up on this from September. Yes any customer on current support maitenance can upgrade to our next generation product PHDVB 5.1.

Pete@PHD Virtual

www.phdvirtual.com, makers of PHD Virtual Backup 5.1 for Vmware and Xen Server, formally esXpress

www.thevirtualheadline.com www.liquidwarelabs.com
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petedr
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An update on this post. PHD Virtual Backup (PHDVB 5.1) for VMware vSphere was released to General Availability this past Monday 12/6.

Pete@PHD Virtual

www.phdvirtual.com, makers of PHD Virtual Backup for Vmware and Xen Server, formally esXpress

www.thevirtualheadline.com www.liquidwarelabs.com
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DSTAVERT
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I just attended the Webinar yesterday. Looked great. I haven't had the opportunity to download and try it yet but hope to over the weekend.






Forum Upgrade Notice - We will be upgrading VMware Communities systems between 10-12 December 2010. During this time, the system will be placed in READ-ONLY mode.

-- David -- VMware Communities Moderator
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gfredette
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In case you weren't aware, but PHD has backup solutions for ESX1 and Vsphere. It takes advantage of VMware's vStorage API and enable Changed Block Tracking to increase the speed of your backups also, and has source-side deduplication and compression which occur before the data leaves the host. This reduces the network impact and providing an ideal solution for backup over distributed networks and WAN environments.

George Fredette

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AndyR8939
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Thanks, yes I was aware as we originally brough PHD esXpress Backup and started using it in earnest when support for ESXi 4.1 came out.  Product was good and worked as advertised, however we dropped it and went with Veeam in the end.  Reason being, although both products were very similar, we had much better backup performance using Veeam and found it easier to manage.  Support from both companies was great though.

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tria_mt91
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how I get that? and how I can install that on ESXi?

really need the help for backup my VM...:smileyconfused:Smiley Sad

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AndyR8939
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You have to buy esXpress or Veeam as they are not free products.  esXpress I think worked as a virtual applicane you deployed onto your host/cluster which then backed up the VMs and Veeam runs as an app on either a VM or physical host.

Both worked fine for us, but Veeam was much faster and easier to use we found so ended up going with that.

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tria_mt91
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http://www.phdvirtual.com/trial-vmware-5-ty

u can download there for trial...Smiley Happy

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