ESXi backup options?

bremen1874

bremen1874

bremen1874

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I’ve used ESXi in the past to create test environments, but never for hosting production servers.

Production servers will obviously need to be reliably backed up. This can be achieved at the guest level, but I was wondering if there are any cheap (£100’s not £1,000’s), or preferably free, methods of backing up at the host level?

  • The host storage will be local.
  • There’s a decent window while the guest machines could be offline if necessary.
  • The backup would preferably be over the network to a physical Windows server (and subsequently dumped to LTO).
I’m not after chapter and verse, just a nudge in the right direction (if there is one).

Thanks.
 
In all honesty you're not going to find a solid solution for 100's. You shouldn't skimp when it comes to backup solutions. If you're company doesn't see the value in a solid solution, you should question why.

Veeam or Backup Exec are the obvious choices here. I can't really think of any cheap solutions. :(
 
Veeam is by far the best backup solution. But it's going to me more than your budget I bet (it's licenced per ESXi Host).

No need to take the machines down, it integrates into Virtual Center and it's lightning fast (especially for the incrementals). It's also clientless as well.

The downsides are that there is no backup groups (so you can't create one backup job and add machines to it). If you rename a PC you will need to re-add it to the job as well.

It's by far the best solution I've seen for backing up VM's.



M.
 
Thanks for the Veeam recommendations. It looks like I'll have to wait until next week to get any pricing information, and it probably will prove to be too expensive.

I'd rather avoid Backup Exec (or any other Symantec products).

The company does believe in having solid backup solutions. At the moment I’m just trying to nail down the costs to see if virtualising the existing servers makes sense. The backup side of things is obviously going to be an important consideration.
 
Another vote for veeam from me. We use it in a production capacity for well over 150 servers and it's very reliable and much cheaper than any of the classic physical backup products. If you need any other info feel free to ask.
 
If your licenced for vCenter then take a look at vRD (VMware Data Recovery).
Backup VM's to remote share on windows box > dump to tape.
Job done :)
 
Nikumba said:
Out of interest why?

We use Backupexec to backup our VMWare systems about 50 VM's over 3 hosts from our Lefthands to tape, and back up our Windows servers without issue.

Kimbie
Click to expand...

It's just a personal dislike I've picked up over the years. I'd use their software if necessary, but only if there wasn’t a viable alternative.
 
Most backup software has some kind of agent. I'd recommend that, it's what I want to do - currently have Veeam, dislike it, and I want to integrate it into NBU.

But if you want it on the cheap, you can always do it yourself, not sure if VCB is still available in 4/5, but it's scriptable, just requires a bit of fiddling.
 
VCB was replaced by vRD in 4 & 5 which is lightyears ahead of the afformentioned VCB.
If you wanted something cheap and dirty you could always just use NT Backup or Windows Backup depending on the platform and then dump those to tape.
Its not the most elegent solution and comes with all the irritation of an agent based recovery Vs just restoring the VM but it would work.
 
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Thanks for the suggestions and comments.

I’ve come to the conclusion that ESXi is great for test environments, but that’s about it. I was hoping it would be suitable for my very small scale virtualisation plans, but it’s looking like it won’t be. Unfortunately I haven’t got the scale to justify any paid for version.

I’ve also been looking at Hyper-V, and from my initial testing it seems to do everything I would need it to.

Hyper-V hardly seems to get mentioned (on this forum) compared to ESXi. Are there any good reasons to not use it?
 
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