ESXi backup options?

[bremen1874]

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.

 

[bremen1874]

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.

 

[bremen1874]

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

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.

 

[bremen1874]

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?