Given a production environment running VMware ESXi 5 and VMware View 5. Given that all components of this system run as VM's inside ESXi 5. After reviewing the VMware view best practices guide the following recommendation is given.
- Step 1 Back up vSphere
- Step 2 Back up View Connection Server AD-LDS datastore
- Step 3 Back up View Composer database
- Step 4 Back up vCenter database
Is this not rather redundant since all components are themselves running on VM's inside ESXi, and will effectively have been backed up after step 1? If using NexentaStor CE, how do features like ZFS snapshots, auto-tier and auto-sync fit into the backup plan?
All of the best practice steps need to be followed as each piece can break/be misconfigured in separate ways. There are no shortcuts.
What you are doing should work but always run a restore to make sure your backup strategy is good and working. This should be a regularly scheduled event.
We don't the same SAN you have, but we do use Recoverpoint from EMC, which is a cool technology(constantly running snapshots) and \have a quarterly schedule to bring everything up in a secondary site and test it.