Hi folks:
I'm helping a small business with their VMWARE environment. THey have:
* A single ESXi 5.5 HOST (VMWARE ESSENTIALS). It's a DELL PowerEdge R720, 32gb with DAS (about 2TB)
* Three VMS. All W2012 Server. (DC, Sharepoint/Utils, RDS Server).
Recently, VEEAM B&R7 was put in. It runs on one of the VMs (the Sharepoint/Utils VM). It has (3) jobs to backup the VMs...one job per VM.
They are being backed up to a Synology DS412+ with 12tb storage (using (4) 4TB SATA Drives).
I've created a couple iSCSI LUNS. One is hooked up to the ESXi HOST. I've created a separate datastore and have manually used VMKFSTOOLS to manually copy the folders from the DAS datastore (DATASTORE1) to the iSCSI volume (ISCSCISTORE).
The VEEAM backup runs and stores data to a separate iSCSI volume attached to the Sharepoint VM as Drive e:.
So here's my question:
If I assume we lose the host for some reason, I could build another host, mount the ISCSCISTORE and use the older manually copied folders to mount the Sharepoint VM and use VEEAM to recover the VMs.
But I wonder if there's a way to simply copy DATASTORE1 each night to ISCSCISTORE so that each day the VMDK files and configs are on that volume. In a recovery scenario, I could build a new host and simply attach the iSCSI volume and mount the VMs.
Our host runs slow. VEEAM is backing up the VMs, but it's slow because the DAS is 7200 RPM drives (only 4 drives). My friend is a small business. He'll never invest into a real SAN, and may never buy a second host. BUt I'm working to convince him to get some better equipment.
In the mean time, I just don't see that using VEEAM is going to help recover a failed host. Or frankly, if the Sharepoint VM gets corrupt, I'd have to build a new VM, install VEEAM, mount the backup VOLUME, and try to recover from the VEEAM VIBs then...an awfully slow prospect.
So what would you do? Given (1) host with DAS, (1) DS412+, (1) VMWARE ESSENTIALs, what would you do differently to try to be able to position yourself for faster recovery?
PS. I put a similar comment on the VEEAM forums but they are less than helpful there.
My hope was perhaps there might be a way to do an online copy of the VMs, or automate exporting of OVAs to the iSCSISTORE each night. That way I know I have another mountable volume with full copies of the VMDKs and configs just sitting there ready to quickly be attached to a repaired host.
