Posted: 3/5/2012 7:01:50 AM EDT
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What software are you guys using to backup VMs running on VMware vSphere ESXi? I currently manage some ESXi boxen in a lab environment and have been using VMware's Data Recovery Appliance to backup the VMs. It doesn't look like it'll scale well. For the backup hardware I currently have servers that can serve shares via NFS and/or CIFS, but I'm looking for a better software solution. Thanks.
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I use Crashplan to back up some of the guest VM's, but it's a program installed on the actual guest. I'm looking at running ghettoVCB to start backing up the actual ESXi host.
YMMV, http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8760 |
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Quoted: Out of curiosity, what makes it seem like it won't scale well? I have been using it on small scale (less than 30 VMs) setups and haven't seen issues. At what point do you expect problems? I currently admin two vSphere clusters, each with three ESXi hosts, plus an additional two standalone hosts. There's a total of 52 VMs spread across them, not including the two instances of the VMware DRA and I'm getting error messages related to the DRA not being able to create and remove snapshots, etc. i also saw some comments in the forums on vmware.com indicating that DRA has scaling problems. I figured it would be a good idea to start looking for a replacement before issues get too bad.
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There are several out there that we have looked at:
VEEAM Backup and Recovery vRanger AppAssure But in the final vote there can be only one! We are using VEEAM, and I would use no other. VEEAM is honestly the first piece of software I have purchased that does what they say it will the way they said it would. I AM NOT DISAPPOINT! It is what make VMware just that much better. |
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Quoted:
Quoted:
Out of curiosity, what makes it seem like it won't scale well? I have been using it on small scale (less than 30 VMs) setups and haven't seen issues. At what point do you expect problems? I currently admin two vSphere clusters, each with three ESXi hosts, plus an additional two standalone hosts. There's a total of 52 VMs spread across them, not including the two instances of the VMware DRA and I'm getting error messages related to the DRA not being able to create and remove snapshots, etc. i also saw some comments in the forums on vmware.com indicating that DRA has scaling problems. I figured it would be a good idea to start looking for a replacement before issues get too bad. Thanks, I'll keep my eyes peeled for problems. Hopefully our small setups are OK with it for a while. |
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We are currently using AppAssure but Veeam would be a good one too.
I initially used VM Data Recovery but had a lot of problems if an appliance was shutdown or migrated hosts. Was just too damn much trouble, I needed to know for a fact that my servers were being backed up without having to check it each day. |
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Quoted:
We currently use vranger, but are out growing it. Like above, we are looking at veeam next. We used to use vRanger, and got a competitive discount when we switched. When we used vRanger I was doing both backups and replicates, I don't need to do replicates any more because I can bring up the backups in a couple of minutes. |
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Quoted:
We are currently using AppAssure but Veeam would be a good one too. I initially used VM Data Recovery but had a lot of problems if an appliance was shutdown or migrated hosts. Was just too damn much trouble, I needed to know for a fact that my servers were being backed up without having to check it each day. We demo'd AppAssure, and if we had baremetal boxes and wanted one solution for VM's and bare metal we would have bought it. |
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Quoted:
Quoted:
We are currently using AppAssure but Veeam would be a good one too. I initially used VM Data Recovery but had a lot of problems if an appliance was shutdown or migrated hosts. Was just too damn much trouble, I needed to know for a fact that my servers were being backed up without having to check it each day. We demo'd AppAssure, and if we had baremetal boxes and wanted one solution for VM's and bare metal we would have bought it. Yeah we use it for both. It has worked pretty well so far. |