How to best backup virtual environment?

Inside the Windows environment I really like the Backup Exec suite.  Always worked extremely well for me on foth servers and apps (such as Exchange).  Since you're going to a VMware environment, you can start to take advantage of the included VMware Data Recovery (link)which is really great for backing up the entire VM.  Together, these two solutions provide exceptional backup and recovery coverage.

VMware Data Recovery is only included with Essentials Plus, do you have a Licensed Version of VMware vSphere?

Appreciate you pointing that out Hanccocka.  From Essentials Plus up Data Recovery is included.  Since he's referring to Symantec and Commvault solutions, I wasn't worried about anything in the free versions, so recommended a tool included in a most versions of paid vSphere licenses.  But again, thanks for pointing this out.

Since we are going to a virtual infrastructure it will be a work in progress.  Can Veeam backup stand alone servers as well as VM servers?  

@L4Net: so you don't use Symantec for virtual backups you actually have 2 products?

Is this what we'll need to do if we have VMs and Stand-Alone servers in the network?

No Veeam is only for virtual infrastructure, you would need to consider Symantec if you want a single poorer product.

Hi, I run a virtual environment of almost 40 servers, and do the following backups.

We use Volume Shadow Copy which runs at 7.00am and midday on all simple file share data drives.

Each day there is a Blue Ray Drive burnt with the core financial data and business core data. We use a simple and cheap (around $50) backup software (with verify after burn) called novastor to collect from the file shares on the Virtual servers and burn directly to the Blue Ray Drive. These Disks are Write Once and then get stored as a snapshot of the core business data each day.

Under windows backup we use network shares and load a HDD in a removable draw (we have a string of them and use one each day). This is the data from the shared drives on the servers. Like the Library, Students, StaffData ( this includes the Core financial Date etc). We have about 1TB of data.

Finally under VMWare we use VDR to produce a deduplicated backup store of all of our servers. This allows us to restore a fully working server from the time of the backup. The data store is under 500GB and undeduplicated the data is about 24TB. It works well. We create new VDR Stores about every 2 to 3 months and delete the old ones every 6 months or so.

There is an issue of restoring a Domian Controller from a backup where you can't get it to work again with the other Domain Controllers. To get around this we would restore the Domain Controller with the FSMO roles and rebuild the other 3 Servers and promote them to DC's so they all work together. DC2 would need to have a backup of the DHCP exported form the old unworkable machine to be imported to the newly rebuilt DC as we have our leases spread over 2 DHCP servers running on 2 of our DC's

Probably more infomation than you need but this has worked well for us over the past 5 years or so. This simple 3 layered backup is simple and efficient to server our needs.

Hope this helps.
Peter
       

Thanks for all the great information!  As for the article it appears VMWare Data Recovery and Veeam Backup are to disk based.
Our VM environment will consist of Cisco UCS Blades and EMC VNX Storage.  Would you backup the data to the EMC given you are backing up the VMWare environment and the EMC is part of the EMC environment?  Is VEEAM dedup?

vDR and Veeam both support DeDupe.

Most VM backup technologies are disk based, Symantec can be to tape.

We would not backup to the same single point of failure that the VMs reside on!

If you lose you EMC, your backups are also gone!

That what I was thinking so do most people have two SANs?  You have one for storage and one to push backups to?  I'm gathering the disk space the backups go to will need to be big if you want to save a month of data to them.  i.e. if we backup 3 TB of data we'd need 4.5TB of disk space?

I will check out Veeam but just want to make sure I have my strategy right before I do.  Thanks again for all the answers!

Yes SANs or NAS.

Then for DR can you take those backups to tape i.e. with Symantec and be able to restore a file for example from tape or not because of dedup?

You can archive to tape. But you need to use Veeam to Restore a file.