pixellip Posted April 10, 2014 Posted April 10, 2014 Hi We are experimenting around with Visualizing our servers......with VM Ware. It's quite interesting I reckon. We thought we would try to install SQL into a Virtual machine.........and put IIS on there.....inside the virtual image itself. What is the best way of backing this up would you say? Do you backup the whole image everyday ( or can you suggest another way? ). Virtual machine images can be very large.....can you capture them incrementally or should one be backing up the files themselves rather than the whole image? Thanks for your input....
Trojan Posted April 10, 2014 Posted April 10, 2014 Use Veeam Veeam: Modern Data Protection Designed for backing up VM's.. It really is excellent.
pixellip Posted April 10, 2014 Author Posted April 10, 2014 Thanks everyone. Are there any cheaper alternatives............or other recommendations....
pete Posted April 10, 2014 Posted April 10, 2014 OP: what're you using - the free version of ESXi? Try Trilead VM Explorer. The free version (no backup scheduling, no file-level restore) is always free. Paid is £450. If the project becomes serious (vmware essentials purchase), I'd lean towards Veeam.
synaesthesia Posted April 10, 2014 Posted April 10, 2014 Veaam here too for some of our servers, others we just backup like any other physical with BackupAssist. If all goes south, it takes but minutes to get a machine up and running again from a blank template and then just a matter of restoring data. Half the fun of virtual machines though is the ability to be up and running again far quicker in terms of failure, so it's generally a shame to slow things down like that
teejay Posted April 10, 2014 Posted April 10, 2014 We use VMware, if I was starting afresh I would seriously look at using Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and DPM as it really has moved on a lot now and with the school pricing on Microsoft stuff it saves a fortune over VMWare and Veaam. Veaam is getting really expensive now as they push into the enterprise market, although it does a brilliant job.
bossman Posted April 10, 2014 Posted April 10, 2014 (edited) Xenserver 6.0.2 here and we run scheduled snapshots which are then hived off to another storage repository, for file backup we use BE 12.5 which does a very nice job in a D2D2T scenario, all our Virtual hosts have 2 mirrored disks 10k.6 as another precaution and these are connected to SUN 7110 SAN which runs both RAID5 and RAID6 across 2 volumes one for speed and the other for reliability. Just recently purchased a Synology Rackstation, 34TB of formatted storage now I have filled up the disk tray with 4TB drives 😊 looked at Veaam but it was too expensive for us atm perhaps later when we have a larger budget. Edited April 10, 2014 by bossman
cpjitservices Posted April 11, 2014 Posted April 11, 2014 (edited) We use Actifio..... We can restore a server within minute sor hours by pushing the VM back to ESXI or any other host for that matter.... Once we've done our full backup it's only file changes that are backed up - or Changes on Servers (Copy Data). Remote Mount is a god send... never seen it on any other product!! Basically just click Mount on a VM/File/FOlder and it will mount A VM to a ESXI Host, or a file/folder as a mapped drive on your local machine.... THen copy the file back if you need to or even work on that file live. Check out the videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/actifio We used to use VEEAM, I think I've still got it running. It's good. But we are pushing the Actifio product. Any extra info let me know. Edited April 11, 2014 by cpjitservices 2
pixellip Posted April 11, 2014 Author Posted April 11, 2014 Why not use Veaam for all of them? I was wondering about what happens when it goes belly up.......although with Raid 1 and Raid 5 it's not such a worry....
cpjitservices Posted April 11, 2014 Posted April 11, 2014 This is the interface I get with Actifio.. It's the Dashoard. Just to show you. It explains the product better than I have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jNOQhkEaZM&list=TLX7C8BXHX7_FrbDf4lvch_m_GIePZ72A4
PotNoodleTech Posted April 11, 2014 Posted April 11, 2014 Veeam is outstanding for backing up Vmware and Hyperv. If you're just experimenting with ESXi and using the fre licence version - you can also get a free licence version of Veeam to try out. The Free version can back up and restore entire VMs or individual files and even live migrate VMs from one host to another. The main limitation is that you can not schedule/automate any backups, you have to manually right click on the VM and do a backup, second biggest limitation is you can only back up one VM at a time - can't set all 20 off running. It's a great way to learn how modern VM based backup works! It's also a gret way of actually backing up your systems for free as long as you don't mind kicking off the process yourself! I'm investigating Hyperv options myself this year too.
pete Posted April 11, 2014 Posted April 11, 2014 Veeam doesn't work with free ESXi as of 5.5 (or didn't, last I heard). If you're still within the 30-day trial* of ESXi it might do, but I haven't tested it. *all features available, acts like it's a bought copy.
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