VMware Backup products & Solutions

[koopie]

A bit of history first befor I ask the question.
We are in the planning stage of our Vitulaization project. Our plan is to convert at least 12 of our existing servers to VM's & host them on 3 Dell PE2950 servers attached to an EMC cx10 SAN. The SAN will have 3Tb of F/C drives and 4 Tb of SATA drives. Primary storage will be F/C and the SATA will be for used for backup to disk. We are adding to this a tape libraty directly attached to the SAN as a final backup solution.
We have had a capacity plan done & most of our servers are candidates for virtualization and a proposal has been presented to us. As part of this proposal they have recommended a product called "CommVault" as our primary backup solution. I am looking for comments & experience with this product in a real world experience. We have had the sales speal given to us but I would like to hear from people that are in a similar syuation to us and have working solutions in place. Look forward to all comments of all persuasions.

regards,

ChrisK

 

[Arisap]

the big question is -- what are you trying to backup? VMDK's? Windows File Level? ESX host?

 

[jfrantz]

Chris,

I use esXpress to backup the VMs and ARCserve for file level backup. I believe the next version of esXpress will support file level backups from virtual machines.

I've looked at CommVault and it is very nice but also very expensive.

-Jeff

 

[Arisap]

If you are willig to spend a significant amount of money, an investment in Avamar (an EMC product) may be worth your while. Avamar does file de-duplication backups. It has a certified agent that runs in the CoS to do vmdk backups and a windows agent to do file level backups. It is an amazing product, and has a very low CPU and memory impact on the ESX host and the windows guest session