Backing up VMware ESX 3.5 with CommVault 8

[cabraun]

I am looking for peoples experience with backing up Virtual Servers in an ESX 3.5 U5, Virtual Center 2.5 U5 environment.

We have 8 ESX 3.5 servers in 2 clusters (6 in 1 and 2 in the other) and 1 Virtual Center 2.5 to manage the virtual environment of about 140 virtual servers.

Anyone out there backing up their VMs on ESX with CommVault? Currently we back everything up with iDAs in the VMs and we meet our backup windows, but it just is no longer efficient to do it that way.

I am particularly interested in doing this with Hot-Add mode where the VCB proxy runs in a virtual machine rather than a separate physical machine on the fiber SAN fabric, but I would like to hear from anyone doing this whether using Hot-Add, SAN or LAN modes.

 

[JG5]

Hot Add mode will utilize the IO stack of the physical ESX server, so that may not be the most efficient method depending on the number of virtual machines. VCB works, but the snapshot has to be copied from the datastore and staged on the proxy server prior to backup. This may increase your backup window over what it currently is. I would push to upgrade your ESX servers and guest hardware versions so that you can leverage the vStorage API features with Commvault.