what to do

jonq · ‎12-08-2010

Hello all. I am looking at replacing our servers and really want to go to VMware and consolodate them. The VSphere Essentials package looks right for us. i would buy two new server with dual processors 16 gig ram each. I would run our main accouting software on one and our less critical servers on the other. everything looks great to me expect the idea of backup. i dont think i want to invest into the essentials plus package because i dont want to have to add a SAN to get the high availablity. i just want to be able to know that if one server would ever crash i would have an up to date backup of the VM to bring up on the other server. what do i need to be looking for to do this?

also where do i go for good guides on best practuses for setting up a small buisness on VMware?

Thank You!

Rumple · ‎12-08-2010

there are quite a few products out there. The primary contenders are really veeam, vRanger, and esXpress.

I used to use vRanger and esXpress, but have recently started using veeam.

For esx servers with local storage, I like the veeam essentials package to go with the vmware essentials.

For me, its a single product that does backup and restore, plus for your critical VM's you could also run a replication across to the other server...in the event one piece of hardware goes down, you can use veeam to get things up and running pretty quickly on the other box.

I'm sure others can talk about the other products, I just haven't used them in a while.

logiboy123 · ‎12-08-2010

Given your requirements I would probably just use ESXi (which is free) on two HP/IBM/DELL servers with plenty of local storage.

For the ESXi operating system drive I would have two 146GB disks in a mirrored raid 1 configuration. Or I would buy the preinstalled Embedded option of ESXi direct from my hardware vendor.

For Virtual Machine hard disks and data I would have at least three 500GB disks in a Raid 5 array configuration.

If you don't want high level functions like HA and you don't have central shared storage, then buying vCenter is a bit of a waste of money.

Just have an extra physical box as your backup server with a tape drive connected and you are golden.

Regards,

Paul Kelly

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AndreTheGiant · ‎12-08-2010

The Essential Plus already include the framework for backup.

It requires scripting, but could be better than nothing!

All

what to do