Hi,
I am looking at putting in a VMWare solution at a clients, this client over time may end up with multiple hosts and a SAN, but for the moment we are looking at the following setup.
Main Site
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Single ESXi 5.0 host with local storage for VMs
IOmega PX6-300d (6tb) NAS setup in RAID 5 (4tb)
Remote Site
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IOmega PX6-300d
Two sites will be connected via Cisco VPN Tunnel.
The two PX6-300d's are capable of doing block level synchronization which is required as the remote site needs to access large CAD files and to upgrade CAD software to a version that would work in Citrix/RDS costs a significant amount and yields little additional benefit.
For backup we are looking at an Axcient backup appliance that will do image backups of their VMs and replicate to cloud storage, but we will be excluding the client files from the backup (also offers VMWare functionality to failover those VMs if necessary). For backup of the Files we will rely on the IOmega synchronization with exact copies of data at each site. They don't require a significant amount of retention, however I would like to at least have something like Shadow Copy where I can go back a few versions of files.
Here is the question...
If I create a VM file server and use a RDM for filestorage on the IOmega and create windows shares with Shadow Copy enabled, will that work? If it does, will synchronization still work? What if a user on the remote side opens and edits a file not through windows (obviously Shadow Copy won't pick that up) will that cause problems?
Altenatively the PX6-300d has a feature for doing a file copy which I could run nightly to create at least a copy of the previous couple of days of data? Then I have to make sure I have a way of cleaning up previous copies so the device doesn't fill up.
I know this isn't the best solution, but we are working with a client with a budget and trying to come up with a solution that works.
Any thoughts on this are appreciated.
Thanks,
B
