Thanks for the insight Sergeadam. We're on the same wavelength.
>>First you have to set goals. What are you trying to acheive from a backup solution
Well first, given all the money we dumped into virtualization I'd like the same OS level redundancy and restore capabilities I had with bare iron twelve years ago. It's that simple. Our operating systems and applications conduct our business, not VM kernels. With bare iron in 1998 I'd use Ghost to back up critical servers to a spare local drive, and use file level back-ups to cover anything else. Even if my entire OS partition or physical drive took a bullet it was a simple task to restore the OS in entire state in less than 20 minutes. Bang - done - server back up. Meanwhile most of my contemporaries would run around looking for their Windows restore disks and shut down production for a few days. After all...they had the MCSE ![]()
Fast forward a few years and I started using tools like Paragon, which could do in-state clones to a spare drive or network, often without dropping the server at all. If the system OS took a bullet for whatever reason I could restore it quickly and reliably. When you spend 500 hours getting a Citrix cluster to work flawless you don't use ArcServe to back-up your OS. You learn to clone the OS and stop listening to the nitwits telling you Servers are 'special' and can't be cloned.
Fast forward to now, and I'm running into data centers with data stores slung all over the place with no real schema in mind and pricey back-up mechanisms not working. If I Google problem issues with Snap-Shots I could spend a month reading them all with many VM specialists telling me it's a clunky and primitive process and others telling me it's a panacea, so I'm starting to thing there's a distortion field somewhere. My current back-up solution is 5months old, was put in place by a VMware consulting company, and now I'm told I have to resort to pricey SAN's level back-up methods which eat up any savings I incurred consolidating servers in the first place? This does not compute. This is a School District where budgets are tight.
So, the question remains and has yet to be answered. Is VCenter and it's stock tool set capable of cloning/ backing up / mirroring (whatever you want to a call it) a guest OS and be granular enough to not have to deal with attached datastores blowing up the snap-shot process?