VDP 5.5 - backing up to something else

[mordzy]

Ok, im a little confised.

I used to use consolidated backup a few years back which was great for the occasions VM backup to SMB and then on to some removable media.

I thought id look at VDP but it appears its limitations are that it can only backup to the appliance its self (or another LUN). so in a small business environment where only one SAN is present. whats the point of it? I'm simply backing up to production SAN.

Sure i understand i can restore if something happens software wise but if my SAN fails I'm screwed.

Just wondering what people do to mitigate this without purchasing more expensive backup software.

Thanks

[JLackman]

Even with a single SAN, I would presume multiple drive pools, etc., supporting multiple datastores on the VMware side. So, the VDP backups/storage could easily be designed to not reside on the same actual disks as the running VMs. VDP is considered to be a low cost, entry level solution to provide some backup without the need for third party solutions. Even VDP Advanced shares some of these same limitations. I think if you're looking for more robust or granular Recovery Time Objectives, you'd be looking at VMware Replication. I've used it with success for a while, with just some planning around where it's placed, and how the SAN is set up. Of couse, my boss liked it because it was free.  ---added/edited -- of course if your entire SAN lays down, you're up a creek anyhow right?

Message was edited by: Jonathan Lackman

[snekkalapudi]

Hi,

I am trying to share my thoughts on you point - " but if my SAN fails I'm screwed."

VDP-Advanced version 5.5 supports replication. It means you can replicate data from your primary VDP-Appliance to another VDP-Appliance. It is really cool feature. You can just choose to replicate only your important VMs and not every thing. - I have come across a simple video on youtube - Network-Efficient Replication with VDP Advanced - VMware vSphere Data Protection - YouTube

[shaneadams]

I added an inexpensive NAS box (Synology) to my network and connected my ESXi hosts to it through NFS (i.e.-NFS datastore), then created the appliance on the NAS box.  The NAS is in a different building from my production SAN (connected by fiber) so I'm pretty confident I could recover from a pretty large list of the major disasters. 

You could accomplish something similar on a budget with a program like FreeNFS on a Windows workstation with a large hard drive, then replicate the appliance to removable disk or tape.  At some point performance may become an issue but at least you could get your backups off to a different device.  It's pretty cheap and simple to test.