I have a smallish lab environment (16 x ESX4iU1 hosts and VC4U1) that I periodically want to backup.
Normally in production we snap to secondary SAN boxes then have disk-based VTL backups via NetBackup which eventually migrate to off-site removable disks but this seems like an overkill for my own kit.
I've spent a bit of time with vSphere's 'Data Recovery' appliance, it was easy enough to setup and I've not really ran into any issues with it but that doesn't mean I trust it fully.
Have you had any experiences with it, positive or negative that would help me decide whether to trust it or pay Symantec for more licences?
Thank you in advance.
We are going through a lot of issues with Vsphere4, VDR and a Virtual Appliance - it has been in operation for approx 3 months and I would have to say the backups are not very reliable. Occasionally the restore points either vanish completely or go "damaged" requiring restore from tape etc. Some days it starts to miss a particular server out and this has to be "fixed". Seemingly this can be caused by integrity checks running during the day but if our experience is anything to go by, this is very flaky.
Its a shame really as the option of a Deduplicated backup store with multiple recovery points readily available on disk looked great. Hopefully it will get sorted out.
We've had no end of problems even with the latest VMware DR appliance (1.2) on vSphere 4.1... we just can't get the thing to connect 90% of the time, and when it does connect, it appears to work well, but then it will magically stop connecting. We've also had several backups fail with a mysterious "sharing violation" error, even though the target store is dedicated only to VMware DR.
In short: it's not fully baked yet. We want to dump BackupExec as quickly as possible, and are looking for other solutions.