Citrix Xenserver backup options

[Nick1949]

Just wondering if anyone is using an alternative to Backup Exec (2008) to back up a stack of Windows Server 2008 R2 servers on Citrix Xenserver?

We are currently doing D2D2T on the individual virtual servers, which works fine on the disk 2 disk part but our tape autoloader is beginning to reach capacity.

Almost all the data is held on an HP MSA2000 SAN and yes I do need to recover individual files!

[Steven_Cleaver]

Hi

 

We Shutdown the Servers and export the VM's in order this is all done via a script then the servers are set to restart, the exports are stored on a Terrastation then over the Weekend they are copied over to a USB Hard Drive again by script. We also use shadow copy to easily restore users data.

[irsprint84]

we used this at the time, you get one XEN free: Quorum Software, Inc.

 

in the end I got sick of it and moved to HYPERV and use DPM

[bossman]

@issprint84:

 

+1 Quorum Software, Inc.

 

Looks a very good and comprehensive package, could I ask how much it cost you, we have 3 Xenserver hosts with a Sun 7110 SAN backend running the VM's?

[irsprint84]

I was good, think it was £400 or something when quoted I only used it for one then got sick of it and moved to HYPERV

[jamesfed]

Move on up to Hyper-V and setup DPM - as your a school both System Center Virtual Machine Manager and DPM 2010 will be as cheap as chips.

For your tape drive your only real option is to look at getting higher capacity tapes.

[john]

We use CA's Arcsoft which as support for Citrix XenServer in the sense that it is licensed per host and you can then backup unlimited VMs on that host so yes I may loose my XenServer install but the fact that it takes no more than 30 minutes to install and configure the base Xen OS I can live without that but all my VMs are backed up.