Backup Plan - Advice?

[alainrussell]

Hi,

We've had a VSphere install (Essentials Plus) running for a few months are looking to upgrade our backup plans. Currently we backup to file level on all affected VM's - This is done with legacy shell scripts we had running before moving to the VM environment. This has worked well for us in the past, but we're now looking to something that allows faster recovery in the event of a failure - At the moment we need to rebuild a VM, then recover the data files (Web/MySQL servers so still relatively quick). Ideally we'd want to be able to restore VM's quickly in the event of a complete failure.

With our Essentials plus license we have VDR, so are looking to use this. Ideally we'd want this to be backing up offsite - Our office is connected to the data centre through a 100Mb Fibre connection. Will this work ? If so - what are the best options for hardware at the other end to backup onto - I'm assuming we use an NFS share - connect that to the VDR appliance and backup to that if it works ?

What are the other options for an offsite backup ?

Thanks

Alain

[AnatolyVilchins]

VDR will provide faster VM recovery but if

you are planning to backup to storage on a remote site over a 100MB

link then you need to establish if you can recover full VM's over that

link faster than your current approach of rebuilding the VM and

carrying out a standard restore with your existing backup

infrastructure. 100Mbps links will support a restore speed of around

5-8Megabytes/sec if everything is going well, a 20GB VM would take just

over an hour to restore, if you have 10 of those it's going to take

about 12 hours to bring everything back up. That may not be an issue at

all though, it all depends on what sort of DR objectives you need to

meet. The initial backups will take some time too (obviously) but day

to day backup speeds will be much better as VDR backups are incremental

in nature.

One other point about VDR is that file level restore is still

considered experimental by VMware so you will still want to keep your

existing backup architecture for that (if its any good).

There's no problem with using NFS for the VDR datastore. You can

actually use a SAMBA\Windows share too if you want - the VDR appliance

supports that even though ESX doesn't.

There are a lot of other options, most major backup vendors provide

direct vSphere aware plugins for their products which are pretty good

but if you are looking for something that is more specific to a small

vSphere environment Veeam Backup & Recovery might be a worth taking a look at - it has a lot more features than VDR.

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iSCSI Software Support Department

[alainrussell]

Thanks. Initially we're just looking to get the backups out of the data centre. Recovering is not as much a problem as we're 10 minutes drive to the Data center so can get the backup server plugged into a Gb switch quickly enough in the case of a massive failure.

I think we'll get VM backups running and run both backups at the same time (our current file backups snapshot linux file changes so are pretty efficient and I think VDR is Windows only file restore at the moment) Running both in parallel will give us a better restore option for VM or files.

Thanks for the Advice. Will run some tests and see if NFS or SAMBA works best/faster - I'm not fussed either way.

[heybuzzz]

To provide VM based backup we use Vranger Pro to a Data Domain DD510 dedup device. This has been in Prod for about 3 years now and offers great fulls and file level restores.