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Reader Request: Help for Backing Up Virtual Servers

I'm writing a piece under tight deadline about storage for virtual servers. Are you involved in this? Your best advice and experience more than welcome at dbarney@redmondmag.com.

Posted by Doug Barney on 06/27/2012 at 10:45 AM


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Reader Comments:

Wed, Jun 27, 2012 philmee95 cali

Been looking to get a better backup for our situation. I want something that snapshots making synthetic full backups. I have seen a few that allow you to mount the synthetic full backups on a vm as well. Veeam is vm only. Appasure is expensive and I think windows only (fine by me). A lot of the solutions cost as much as a small SAN, which also does a lot of the same backup features as the backup solutions so the lines get blurred. I forget which software I was taking hard looks at as other projects demanded my attention but I think a few names were quarrum, unitrends (vRecovery or a box), starwind something or the other, vaeem, drobo (which teams with vaeem in special pricing), Dell equiligic as this SAN does a lot; I think even netapp came out with a new small box that includes almost everything though I never did get an actual price. Right now we are using retrospect which I guess is still owned by Roxio but who knows and some win 2008 backups as retrospect does not work with ex 2k10 yet. Icurrenty have a FreeNAS NFS drive as a target for some win2k8 backups and a large desktop with 6 x 2tb drives that could be raided but I undid that running retrospect multiserver on an XP box (the situation that worked before, but times change).

Wed, Jun 27, 2012 Karl Compton Houston, TX

For backup of virtual servers. FreeNAS running on a recently retired server makes a dandy and low-cost iSCSI server that works fine with, for instance, VMware Data Recovery. Slap in a midsized USB key for the OS and a few big SATA drives, create a RAID array, and you have a perfectly adequate place to do backups , complete with redundant power and drives, for a few hundred bucks. I wouldn't run it for production, but for backup its hard to beat.

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