Hi all,
At my main site I have 5 physical servers running.
At my contingency site I have 2 physical servers, running the free version of ESXi, housing these 5 servers, the data of which is sitting on a Netgear ReadyNAS 3200.
The machines are working fine, it's all great. but now we are looking at the backup and restore sides of things. Most threads I have read are all about backing up virtual to virtual, eg. Unitrends and Trilead, and how no VM-level backup exists due to the API lockout, but I'm not sure this applies to me, as I'm actually going P-2-V, and no V-2-V.
Does anyone have experience in this? We will have an identical ReadyNAS 3200 on-site, which could be replicated, but I don't fancy performing a conversion every single day x5, and then sending the data across to the contingency site, and on an internet connection none the less, we don't have a high speed data link or anything, just a 80mb down/12mb up connection.
Currently we're looking at simple file level recovery;
Backup Physical Server to onsite NG 3200, replicate to off-site NG 3200, then copy from that into the virtual machine.
Confusion exists due to the fact that you can't just drag and drop files out side of the VM, as technically the VM exists as just a single file with config files next to it. We would need to then log into the server and restore that way.
Also worth noting that within these servers exists an Exchange 2010 server and a SQL 2008 server, just for added difficulties!
Very long winded, but if anyone is experienced in this set up, I would be greatly appreciative of any help you can provide.
Please note, we are going on the pre-tense that we have no budget, we aren't really willing to spend anything on this (Joys of public sector..).
Many thanks in advance, and if you have any questions, I'm more than happy to answer.
Thanks
Mark