Andrew: In total how much data are you looking at backing up? Do you have minimum times for recovery, how much data you want retained on the device, etc.? We're looking at new backup solutions, we're outgrowing Backup Exec. We are probably going to get a Unitrends backup appliance, it's a physical appliance with its own disks that has been really good at backing up our VMWare environment in demo, I think they have a virtual version of the appliance as well. We've also used PHD's backup solution, but it doesn't work as well with 5.1 as it used to with the 4.X releases because even the newer versions are using out of date backup APIs that VMWare has told people not to use anymore. Also, PHD doesn't like it when VMs VMotion, which is kind of odd considering that's a basic VMWare feature. Also the PHD appliances were taking forever to finish a full. We have about 100TB of VMs and datastores, and the PHD appliances couldn't even get through half of that in a weekend. The Unitrends box looks like it will be able to get through that in about 30 hours. Another thought, have you looked at VMWare Data Protection? Ryan -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Hodgson Sent: Monday, September 02, 2013 4:37 PM To: blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] VmWare backup solutions Hi, I am looking at what people are using to backup ESXI 5.1 environments these days. I am used to using a backup storage appliance/VTL with backup agents running inside the VMs, with a backup software running on a physical server doing the collection work, but know this isn't efficient. Shared storage will be used in this environment, and I am happy to use VSS snapshots. Any suggestions? Thanks. Andrew. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins