Let me start with my environment. We have a Win 2008 box that serves as our DC and AD server. Next we have a server running Oracle VM Server, which hosts about a dozen or so VMs. For those of you who aren't familiar with the product, it uses the Xen hypervisor.
We also have an Oracle VM Manager server, which provides the management interface for all the Oracle VM Servers. In our case, we only have the one Oracle VM Server, so it doesn't have to do a whole lot of management. The OS on both of those boxes is Oracle Enterprise Linux. We also have another physical server running OEL, and a DIY SAN that also runs OEL.
Now for my impressions:
The first thing I did was download the VMWare version of Unitrends. What the heck!? It's a self-extracting .exe that will not run on a 32-bit or non-Windows operating system!? Seriously? In order to extract the .vmdk and .ovf files, I had to upload it to our DC, as it's the only 64-bit Windows computer in our environment. I then had to copy said files to the server on which I was going to run the VM.
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. Believe it or not, there are environments where Windows doesn't exist at all. How hard is it to zip up two files? It's likewise trivial to unzip them--even from a linux command line. I really don't get this. Unitrends claims to be able to back up a whole slew of operating systems, yet the only delivery option for their software requires 64-bit Windows to decompress? SMH
Now for the actual installation. For some reason VMWare Player wouldn't run properly on the linux box on which I wanted to run the VM. So on a lark, I tried Virtualbox, which is not listed as an option for playing the VM. What do you know--it works! Why pay for VMWare Player or Workstation when it will work in Virtualbox? Since we're not running VMWare and building an ESX host just to run backups would be overkill, that's pretty awesome.
Once I got the Unitrends VM configured and the client installed on a couple of our servers, I decided to test the backup process. I can't think of a way to sugarcoat this. The UI ugly and non-intuitive. Eventually, however, I was able to figure out how to add servers to be backed up and do a one-off backup. It looks like the backups work well. They were fairly zippy to boot. As backup and recovery is the most important thing here, the fact that Unitrends will perform that function is a positive. Still . . . the UI desperately needs an overhaul.
Now for my dilemmas: The NFR version lets you backup two host sockets and two physical servers. That's pretty generous. Major props to Unitrends for that. It appears, however, that the only way to back up the VMs on our Oracle VM Server is to do it on a per-server basis. I can't figure out how to get the software to recognize that it should be using the two-socket licenses for that machine. It looks like it's going to take a server license for each virtual server we have, which will make Unitrends ridiculously expensive--unless I am completely missing something here.
So now it's looking like Unitrends won't work for us.Can anyone recommend something that might back up our VMs (Xen hypervisor) as well as our physical servers, but will also not break the bank? We are a startup and don't have a ton of money to throw at this.
Thanks!