VCB with third party Backup software

[Le_Dude]

I'm in the process of writing an offer for one of my customers.

This customer wants to migrate 15 physical systems onto 4 ESX 3.x hosts.

For the moment they have one EMC networker server with agents installed on the physical machines (EMC networker). SQL, Oracle and Exchange agents also installed.

The customer wanted to go with Vmware consolidated backup in combination with these online agents. Is this a good idea?

Can the proxy vcb server also be installed with EMC networker?

Since you need both products licensed I would guess that this solution is much more expensive then traditional way of backup up with 1 backup server and seperate agents.

Any suggestions welcome. The backup part is new to me.

[acr]

Using the agents gives you a better flexible restore method..

Most Backup solutions are installed on the same machine as the proxy, so i guess all should be ok for the networker..

esxRanger driving VCB is another good solution, very cost effective..

http://www.vizioncore.com/esxRangerPro.html

[petedr]

An alternate solution to VCB that you can take a look at is esxpress ( http://www.esxpress.com ). Esxpress provides Full and Delta hot image backups for virtuals and now in the recent beta also does file level backups. The backups run in the virtual space using VBAs ( virtual backup appliances ). You don't need additional hardware to support the backups and it scales nicely as the better host hardware you have the move VBA's you can run.

As for agents to me that has been a business specific decision per server. In some cases running agents along with the vmdk backups makes sense. I used to be responsible for a Oracle production environment that ran as a Virtual and we decided we only needed the image/vmdk backups to support our needs.