Best way to protect two on-premises Esxi 5.1 servers

[Syed_Mazhar]

We want two servers with local storage running VMWare 5.1 and want to ensure that in-case of a  failover they are protected? HOw can we achieve that on-premises and also what is best DR solution for them? Co-located Offsite NAS replication?

[deang1609]

What edition of ESXi are you running and are they managed ? If this is the free edition this will limit your options due to the API restrictions in this edition. However, there are potentially some options available in this scenario, such as Thinware vBackup® - Enterprise Backup for Virtual Infrastructure which leverage's the SSH protocol to backup virtual machines. If you have additional hardware onsite you could use this as a repository for the backups or alternatively create a virtual machine on each host and backup the virtual machines on the alternate host to a repository created on each.

For offsite replication, the options may be dependant on your volumes of data and the cost impact. If you already have a colocation facility it would probably makes sense to use this providing your network bandwidth is sufficient to transfer the data. An alternative option could be to copy the files to a Amazon S3 and also archiving to Glacier if the retrieval limitations meet your business needs. Again, this will be dependant on the network bandwidth you have available,

As a disclaimer, I will add I have no experience of using the above backup solution I am only aware of the availability.

[Syed_Mazhar]

We are running Esxi 5.1 Essentials plus version and these are self managed.

[deang1609]

In this case you could use vSphere Data Protection for creating a backup of your virtual machines either locally or offsite (or both). As well as using vSphere Replication if required to replicate between ESXi host systems if this is deemed necessary.