Hi everyone, I've been struggling with this for a long time now. I would like to get a reliable solution for our backup strategy and DR solution and I need some help to find the answer. Here is a quick overview of our environment.
- vSphere 6 Enterprise with 25 VM SRM license (4 hosts)
- 140 VM's mixed servers (prd & dev) & Horizon desktops
- Remote site with a vCenter & vSphere 6 Enterprise license and enough storage
My goal is to have ALL VM's backed up with a retention of a certain number of days for restore/users file level restores, etc. This would be for regular everyday restores, not thinking about DR. ALSO, I need to have ALL VM's offsite at our remote site in case of a DR. Finally, I want to use the 25 VM SRM license to use for our most critical VM's for DR (ie. Exchange, AD, Sharepoint, SQL Servers, etc).
My main questions are:
1. Do I implement BOTH vDP AND vSphere Replication SRM together? Do they work nicely together?
2. Can I use vSphere Replication ONLY? Replicating ALL VM's, but use SRM for the 25 critical VM's?
3. If I use Replication only, can I keep x number of versions? Can users do file level restores? I imagine the entire VM needs to be recovered first?
4. Would vDP Backup Replication be used with any of this?
5. I would like to be able to use the "application backup" features of vDP such as Exchange & SQL to be able to restore individual mailboxes or databases for example.
I know in previous versions, the 2 softwares didn't work well together, and I can't seem to find any up to date info for these 2 products working together. I know there are other solutions, Veeam, etc., but we've invested heavily in VMWare licensing & SRM, and I'd like to keep the solution as simple as possible, but obviously needs to be reliable too.
Thanks!
