Full VM backup and restore

[gavinmansell]

Hi,

We have an ESX 3.5 environment with both Fibre and iSCSI storage. Up until now we have been using backup exec to access machines for file level backups. We also occasionally use VCB to take full images of some of our VMs. With more and more of our key systems now running on the VI we are looking at new backup and restore options that would enable us to fully backup a VM and result in very fast restore time frames.

Could someone recommend a fully automated backup system that we could investigate further. For speed I presume that this would, in the first instance, be required to be backed up to disk. We would ideally like to get the VM images on to tape at some point as well for offsite storage.

[NHCdmont]

Hi Gavin,

It may be worth you looking into - VEEAM backup and replication, it's made to work with VMware. It's pretty much an all in one package and allows you to backup to either a SAN/NAS or tape...

We're playing with it now and it seems very good...

NHCdmont

[Kahonu84]

Aloha -

I've been using VRanger by Vizioncore for 3+ years. Very solid product and good support.

Bill

[Hieu_Cao]

Backup Exec 2010 also has the Agent for Virtual Infrastructure. Have you tried it?

I am thinking of getting it and would like some feedback if anyone is currently using it out there.

[AntonVZhbankov]

+1 for Veeam

---

MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[jkumhar75]

Veeam backup & restore software is very good in terms performance and support.

You can integrate the Veeam backup software with your enterprise backup solution like Legato Networker,IBM TSM and Veritas Netbackup for the Tape backup and offsite storage.

Jay

MCSE,VCP 310,VCP 410

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[gavinmansell]

Thank you to you all for you quick responses.

We will take a look at both VEEAM and VizionCore vRangerPro. Do any of you use either of theseproducts in conjunction with Backup Exec 2010? We are also investigating the ESX agent option of BE 2010, but are unsure of what it is capable of... i.e can it take backups of VM files and also get results for file level backups from within the VM files?

[amvmware]

BE 2010 will allow you to do a full VM backup and recover individual files from the same backup - this way you don't need to do 2 backup jobs of the same VM - i think most backup solutions are going this way - it is to time and storage consuming to keep doing a file level backup inside the VM followed by a full backup of the VM and its config files.

[gavinmansell]

Thanks amvmware, what licenses are required within BE 2010 to carry this out? We have seen agents for esx hosts, are these all that are required? It would be nice to compare all products mentioned.

[amvmware]

You will need to purchase BackupExec 2010 VMware agents for each host. See attached link. - You will need to check if this is compatible with ESX3.x

http://drh.img.digitalriver.com/DRHM/Storefront/Company/symlam/content/product/factsheets/DS_BE2010....

The following video shows how to use 2010 with vmware.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcjV6t2zs2k

[gavinmansell]

Thanks for this amvmware... looks interesting. We are going to test the three products out and see how we get on.

[gavinmansell]

Thank you all for your assistance

I have tried out VEEAM and BE2010. VEEAM was pretty straight forward to set up and carry out the backups/restores. I have found some issued with BE2010 with it createing a quiesced snapshot prior to backups but this is probably something that I am doing wrong