Not say any of are unaware of this, but there are *many* who are oblivious to the concept of a hotbackup. My opinion is these are not 100% reliable. A hotbackup is very much like pulling the cord out of the wall on a running server and imaging it. Its dirty. Reality is that works a lot of time with a journaling FS like NTFS but it sure as heck doesn't *always* work. When you restore from a hotbackup, you are restoring from a power loss type scenario. If that acceptable to you, by all means do hotbackups :)
I prefer to image (properly) servers and use an agent to compliment dynamic data as it changes. This causes me to have to power down some machines when certain non reproducible changes occur but that's my style... jlc From: Garcia-Moran, Carlos [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2008 7:30 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: ESX backup solutions? 2nd Vote for EsXpress. We've been using it for the past year and I have to say it rocks, As noted you can download a free copy of their basic product and a 30 eval. The basic free copy only allows you to do Full's which is not bad if you have the space / speed. Their Enterprise version comes with everything and it's $1999 List , which is not bad at all The setup we have is Site one back's up all the VM's on Three hosts to Site two by FTP every night, we do Delta's nightly and Full's on the weekends, The Host's on Site Two scans the FTP backup Dir and restores the VMDK's from the night before every morning, so to us it's pretty much BCP on Site two. While the program doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles it's does one thing and does it well. Their next version comes with Dedup, block level stuff and central management coming in Dec. For the price it's very hard to beat From: Jeff Frantz [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 6:54 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: ESX backup solutions? Damien, I've used esXpress for about 1.5 years and I highly recommend it. All in all, it's a fast, inexpensive, and easy to use product. I back up to an 8TB NAS box via FTP then copy full backups to external USB drives weekly for off-site storage. You can backup to a VMFS volume, or use FTP, NFS, or SMB. esXpress has always worked flawlessly, it's easy to configure, and you don't need the program to restore a backup. The delta backups are executable with code to restore themselves. I purchased their file level backup (FLB) option about 7 months ago which allows you to zip up files and/or directories within a Windows VM client. I use it for keeping archives of files such. The FLB isn't sophisticated but it works well. They also have great support forums. Usually questions are answered by the esXpress staff within minutes of being posted. You may want to read through some of the forum questions. It's a good resource and it may give you a better idea of what others are doing with the product. I highly suggest you try it out. You can download a free copy of esXpress from their website. It will take you about 10 minutes to set up and it won't "pollute" your ESX host should you decide not to use it. -Jeff ________________________________ From: Damien Solodow [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 5:22 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: ESX backup solutions? We are looking at some packages for backups and the like of ESX guests. Most things I've seen say that VCB comes up a bit short, and the two products I've seen much about are vRanger, and esXpress. Any experiences, anecdotes, etc on either of these? Other options worth looking into? Damien Solodow, MCSE Senior System Administrator Infrastructure Services Group Information Services Indiana Business College [EMAIL PROTECTED]<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Direct - (317) 217-6881 We are the Foundation of how Business Gets Done! _________________________________________________________ This e-mail, including attachments, contains information that is confidential and may be protected by attorney/client or other privileges. This e-mail, including attachments, constitutes non-public information intended to be conveyed only to the designated recipient(s). If you are not an intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any unauthorized use, dissemination, distribution or reproduction of this e-mail, including attachments, is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify me by e-mail reply and delete the original message and any attachments from your system. _________________________________________________________ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
