which backup solution is good?

[vmwareluverz]

does anyone know which backup solutions are cheap and easy to config for 20 esx hosts environment with about 350 virtual machines. running backend san systems with 4gb fibre channel bandwidth. any comments or suggestions?

[azn2kew · Accepted solution]

There are several backup solutions for VMware and these sounds to be good fit for you to test and trial.

1. VMware Consolidated Backup ->free

2. Veeam Backup ->new to the market and works fine

3. PHP esXpress ->both free and charge version check for details

4. Vizioncore vRangerPro ->license and works great

5. Free VISUB utility from Xtravirt.com

6. There are free script out there to perform backup as well.

There is a complete comparision of backup solutions on site from Edward please check out for details. Hope that helps.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[vmwareluverz]

thanks for the details i will take a look to see which one is great for our solution.

[CABF]

We're using VizionCore esxRanger to backup about 120VMs on 7 hosts.

I wasn't involved in the procurement so I couldn't assess the costs, you should be able to find that out relatively easily. I understand it's not the cheapest of the options on offer.

It's proved very reliable for standard VM backups and has produced good restores. We have about 2% failure rates, which compared to normal client/server backup solutions like NetBackup, etc. is actually quite good from my experience.

I've found two disadvantages. It can't backup MSCS cluster VMs (I'm not sure any of the solutions can, as they depend on the ESX snapshot functionality). And secondly the management of the backup schedule is not very user friendly. There's no calendar view of your backup schedule and all of the jobs are customised by using command lines in Windows scheduled tasks. I was surprised when I discovered that.

So for smaller, simple requirements esxRanger is great. As soon as you start scaling up and increasing the complexity of your backups it does have limitations. One final note, I've found their customer service to be good.

[icebun]

Guys,

How does vRanger deal with backing up Exchange 2003 and SQL etc? Is there a seperate agent?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

vRanger does not contain any agents for the VMs, you can however use the VM quiesce scripts to deal with this aspect of the backups.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization