Use free Storage for Backup

[rschmid]

Hi,

we have free Storage in some of our datastores on vSphere 5.5 hosts.

(VMware vSphere 5.5 Essential License)

Can I share mentioned free Storage for using for backups ?

Do I need a virtual machine for this ?

Kind regards,

Roland

[weinstein5]

If the datastores are VMFS datastores than yes you will need to use a VM to access that space - what back up technology were you considering to use?

[rschmid]

right now we are using Backup Exec 2012. We want to try out veeam.

[ch1ta]

In fact, storing backup data on production datastore isn't considered as the best practice, because with such deployment you have all eggs in one basket. In other words, if something went wrong with datastore, you would loose both production VMs and backup data.

There is a discussion on Veeam community forum regarding similar issue; might be useful for you:

Don't Store Backups on VMFS...But why not? | view topic

Cheers.

[rschmid]

thank you for this comment and link to the mentioned discussion.

maybe best pactrice would be to write backups to iscsi attached storage device or a SAN.

Kind regards,

Roland

[ch1ta]

Yes, if you have spare storage device that might be used as a backup repository (in case of Veeam), it will be the best practice, indeed.

Cheers.