Help with DR Design

[aim60]

My company is considering contracting for traditional Disaster Recovery services. In case of a disaster, we would be provided with non-like hardware, and would have to rebuild/reload our servers from tape.

We have a few Windows servers that would be difficult to rebuild. They have modest CPU & storage requirements. I am considering moving them to VSphere Essentials or Essentials Plus with direct attached storage for DR.

I’m looking for advice on a VM backup solution. The goal is to be able to reliably schedule full backups of the VMs to an SMB share on a physical machine, so they can be backed up to tape (Backup Exec). Preferably, the VMs should be backed up while on-line, with software that is Microsoft VSS aware, and equivalent VMware technology to guarantee valid backups. If absolutely necessary, the VMs could be backed up between a scripted shutdown/startup. However, the scripted shutdown/startup would have to be extremely reliable, as the servers must be put back in production asap.

Any solution that includes a VM backup server that is difficult to rebuild, negates the “simple to restore” goal.

[ScottBentley]

Hi and welcome to the forums,

I think the product most likely to fill your need would be Veeam backup and replication as it is capable of doing VSS aware application backups.

Regards,

Scott

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[aim60]

From my reading, rebuilding the Veeam backup server at the DR site, would not be "simple".

Thanks

[ScottBentley]

You would simply restore the data from tape, click next a few times to install Veeam, point it to the data you restored then start restoring the VM's

I would imagine it will take you longer to install Backup Exec and catalog the tapes

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[jasoncllsystems]

You may get Vizioncore vReplicator a try.

Regards,

jlchannel

MALAYSIA VMware Communities

http://www.malaysiavm.com

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[aim60]

Will Vizioncore vReplicator replicate to an SMB share on a physical server?

[DSTAVERT]

I think you should address that question to Vizioncore to make sure it would satisfy your needs.

[DSTAVERT]

Essentials Plus gives you access to VMware Data Recovery. It is possible to backup the Share to tape. It is a decent day to day file recovery tool as well as being able to capture guests at multiple points in time. http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vdr_pubs.html

You can also have a look at http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9843 An excellent scripted hot backup of all the VMs.

[aim60]

Thanks for the suggestions. I will evaluate the suggested products.

[DSTAVERT]

Let us know how it goes. Good luck