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HMorris
Contributor
Contributor

Disaster Recovery on the Cheap - Portable Hard Drives ?

I am looking for some feedback on a low cost way to transport VM's using a portable drive. I am looking to occasionally backup/ or transport 900 gig of Guest VM's to our DR site. Maybe 15 vm's in all. We have 2 bonded T1's but it just is not going to cut it moving that large data around. I didn't want to do this with tape but maybe I'll have to.

I have been fooling with a Maxtor Central Axis 1TB and even though it has 1gig network card, it's still too slow with only one spindle or just too slow. I am open to other solutions but buying another SAN to do it right is just too expensive right now, and maybe not practical with our 2-T1 speeds.

I am open to ideas, and I'm sure there are better ones out there.

Thanks,

Hmorris

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bmckerritnu
Contributor
Contributor

What version of VMware are you using 3.5 or 4 and ESX or ESXi ?

How do you backup these vms currently to your 1TB drive ?

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AndreTheGiant
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You have a lot of data to move them with a entry level NAS.

You can use a internal SATA drive (1 TB) connected to a supported SAS card.

In this case you can simple make a copy between two datastore.

Or you have to consider some backup/replication program.

For example Veeam Backup and do both backup and replication with incremental mode.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
AntonVZhbankov
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Immortal

Veeam Backup seems a good option to make backups and restore VMs from portable HD. But actually in this case NAS is preferred, not just an USB drive.


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HMorris
Contributor
Contributor

I am using 3.5 ESXi. The DR stuff is new so I have currently been using this Maxtor device to move this data using Veeam. It is not supported of course so I muct connect to it from a workstation and then browse to the datastore to upload the images. It gets the job done but just takes HOURS probably because of using the workstation to complete the transfers.

The SAS card solution might be an idea.

What are most companies doing? They must be spending the money on fast internet connections or using tape? Do they have fast and portable NAS?

Thanks for the help.

HMorris

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