SBS 2008 and Backup Exec 12.5 for VMWare ESX 4.0 system. Best backup method?
Hi all,
I wonder if anyone could advise me on a good backup solution for our office VMWare/SBS 2008 system?
I have recently migrated an old SBS 2003 machine into a new SBS 2008 Premium virtual machine on VMWare ESX4.0 running on a Dell PowerEdge R710 with an MD3000 disk storage. We will have another VM running Win Svr 2008 on the same machine for SQL, IIS, business apps etc. We purchased Backup Exec 12.5 SBS Premium but this hasn't been installed yet, so I'm desparate to get this sorted asap before anything goes wrong!
My main query on this is about a suitable disaster recovery plan and backup regime. We are fortunate to have a 2nd separate building on site (gigabit fibre network linked) where I will house an identical Dell server + MD1000 storage also running VMWare ESX4.0. So my questions are:
- Is it worth getting the BE Agent for VMWare Virtual Infrastructure in order to make best use of the virtualisation and speed of recovery. ie. Will this allow me to restore any of the complete VM's and have it up and running again very quickly on either ESX server?
- Is Backup Exec 12.5 for SBS best installed on the main SBS 2008 virtual machine or is it better installed on a separate server outside of the VMWare hosts?
- I don't have a tape drive, so thought about possibly backing up to the other storage device in the opposite building each night (ie. a network drive?). Is this possible with BE?
I was originally thinking of using DoubleTake software for replicating the two main OS's between the ESX hosts, but I thought this BE solution and VM-level backup may do the job for me. Am I going the wrong way here?! (We don't need immediately failover redundancy here...a day outage max would be acceptable).
Any thoughts/comments are very welcome.
Thanks
I wonder if anyone could advise me on a good backup solution for our office VMWare/SBS 2008 system?
I have recently migrated an old SBS 2003 machine into a new SBS 2008 Premium virtual machine on VMWare ESX4.0 running on a Dell PowerEdge R710 with an MD3000 disk storage. We will have another VM running Win Svr 2008 on the same machine for SQL, IIS, business apps etc. We purchased Backup Exec 12.5 SBS Premium but this hasn't been installed yet, so I'm desparate to get this sorted asap before anything goes wrong!
My main query on this is about a suitable disaster recovery plan and backup regime. We are fortunate to have a 2nd separate building on site (gigabit fibre network linked) where I will house an identical Dell server + MD1000 storage also running VMWare ESX4.0. So my questions are:
- Is it worth getting the BE Agent for VMWare Virtual Infrastructure in order to make best use of the virtualisation and speed of recovery. ie. Will this allow me to restore any of the complete VM's and have it up and running again very quickly on either ESX server?
- Is Backup Exec 12.5 for SBS best installed on the main SBS 2008 virtual machine or is it better installed on a separate server outside of the VMWare hosts?
- I don't have a tape drive, so thought about possibly backing up to the other storage device in the opposite building each night (ie. a network drive?). Is this possible with BE?
I was originally thinking of using DoubleTake software for replicating the two main OS's between the ESX hosts, but I thought this BE solution and VM-level backup may do the job for me. Am I going the wrong way here?! (We don't need immediately failover redundancy here...a day outage max would be acceptable).
Any thoughts/comments are very welcome.
Thanks
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