Hi guys
I've got a simple VI3 setup here, two ESX servers, with FC SAN.
For backups I've got a W2K3 server with FC HBA, a VCB license, and a large RAID array to store backups.
I've got about 10 VM's, who's vmdk's are taking up 700 Gb of diskspace on the SAN. I have 2.7 Tb of local diskspace on the backup proxy.
My goal is to have only image backups. Almost all my guests are Linux and they are backupped at the file-level from within the guest, which works fine.
In order to have multiple VM-image backups, I figured out I could do 3 things:
1.[/b] Barebones method, use ESX Ranger +VCB, and just store 3 image backups of each machine locally. Without any compression at all, this would use 2.1 Tb.
2.[/b] Use ESX Ranger with its so-called 'Differential Engine'. According to the docs this will a) do intelligent compression and b) make images available based on diffs.
Which would mean I could store lots of different versions of each VM image.
3. Use ESX Ranger + VCB, and use W2K3's VolumeShadowCopy service to do the snapshotting. Homegrown idea, but it should work AFAICS.
In the docs I see that ESX Ranger + Differential Engine is not compatible with VCB, but how bad is this?
