Quick straw poll: virtualisation & backup

[gshaw]

Just looking for a quick summary of responses for what your current preferred \ in use techologies are in your virtual environments? I've gone for the two options I'm looking at in each case but feel free to add your own

 

Virtualisation platform...

VMWare or Hyper-V

 

Backup solution...

Backup Exec or Microsoft DPM

 

Storage connection

iSCSI, FC or NFS?

[dhicks]

Virtualisation platform...

 

Xen

 

Backup solution...

 

Rsync

 

Storage connection

 

SATA

 

--

David Hicks

[strawberry]

hyper v, dpm and iscsi. hyper v as it sits on windows , dpm as its cheap and iscsi for much the same reason.

[Butuz]

VMWare

 

Backup Exec

 

iSCSI

[Guest salan]

VMWare

 

Backup Exec

 

iSCSI

 

The same

Edited November 23, 2010 by salan
typing with my nose

[gshaw]

For VMWare \ Backup Exec people did you go to the VM agents or still using the classic agent backup style? If using the VM agent how did it work out price wise (bearing in mind you don't need the Windows agents once you get the VM agent as far as I understand?)

 

Also for Backup Exec people have you tested restore processes and is it working reliably?

[Chuckster]

VMware ESXi

 

Custom scripts to take images. Nothing put in for file-level restore

 

Local storage on the server

[Duke]

• VMware
  
• Backup Exec and Veeam (Veeam isn't actually in place yet because the full virtualisation plan hasn't gone ahead yet)
  
• NFS
  

[Guest salan]

For VMWare \ Backup Exec people did you go to the VM agents or still using the classic agent backup style? If using the VM agent how did it work out price wise (bearing in mind you don't need the Windows agents once you get the VM agent as far as I understand?)

 

Also for Backup Exec people have you tested restore processes and is it working reliably?

 

Backup exec agents and no it didnt restore well.

We had to do a full DR due to a gas explosion near by just a few weeks ago.

Suffice to say that we are in the proccess of re assessing our DR options as we were (in our opinion) down for too long.

We have VDR as well running and that (as we found out) is only any good if you still have a VM!

We had the disks 'trashed' so no vm to recover to.

So we had to rebuild some machines manually and then restore from backup.

As the saying goes. Are you REALLY sure you backups will work? Have you actually tried them FULLY?

As we found out no they don't!

Alan

[Duke]

If you want full DR, check out Veeam for a better way of backing up entire virtual machines and VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) for a proper DR solution that will allow you to test your DR and Business Continuity procedures without having to take down your network.

 

Sorry to hear about the gas explosion, I think anything like that is a sysadmin's worst nightmare.

[Norphy]

Virtualisation platform...

VMWare vSphere 4.1

 

Backup solution...

Commvault Simpana 8 using the VMware iDataAgent and VADP

 

Storage connection

iSCSI

 

I'm still in the testing phase but overall its looking good.

[Guest salan]

Sounds good, but have you actually done a full DR yet?

IE fresh hardware and restored from backup to a fully working server?

I have ben let down so many times with these.

[maark]

Hyper V

DPM

Firestreamer to USB Disk

 

sick of giving money to backup exec for agents, upgrades that don't always work

[Norphy]

Not yet, that's why I say I'm still in the testing phase. I've spent the last couple of weeks getting it installed, getting the backup proxy in place and getting the backups just working. The recovery test phase is what's coming next.

 

I have however tested DR with physical servers using Simpana so I know the software is good.

[Guest salan]

Please let us know how you get on.

Alan

[ChrisH]

Vmware

DPM

FC (Bought when ISCSI couldn't compete )

[Steven_Cleaver]

Virtualisation

Xen

 

Backup

Scripts to Backup Virtual Images and Windows Backup

Shadow Copy for User\shared areas Quick restore

 

Backup to Terrastation

Script to USB disk for offsite backup

[glennda]

Virtualisation platform...

VMWare or Hyper-V

Linux (ubuntu 10.04 lts) KVM as is quicker for hosting machines then vmware not sure about hyper-v as never used it or interested in.

 

Backup solution...

Backup Exec or Microsoft DPM

currently use backupexec and backuppc (exec for things like ad/exchange sql and backuppc for file servers etc)

Storage connection

iSCSI, FC or NFS?

currently using fiber channel msa 2000

[gshaw]

Vmware

DPM

FC (Bought when ISCSI couldn't compete )

 

Interesting, how are you getting on with DPM with VMWare? Is that the agent method you're using there?

[glennda]

does dpm now work with exchange? as when i looked into it - it couldnt backup exchange.

[apaton]

• VMware
  
• BackupExec (Veeam if VM backup only)
  
• iSCSI
  

 

If money no object

 

• VMware vSphere Enterprise
  
• Netbackup 7.x with vStorage API/Puredisk. D2D2T solution. (Commvault is also an excellent product)
  
• Fibre Channel Disks plus SAN Switches (FC has lower disk service times than iSCSI, critical with disk latency sensitive applications such as larger Exchange & SQL servers)
  

[john]

XenServer

Shadowcopies and manual snapshots of Servers every few days

NFS

 

Looking into backup systems from the ground up in a few weeks time with a view of going onto LTO5 and NAS combined setup.

[bio]

VMware Vsphere

Arcserve

FC

 

bio..