VMWare workstation 11 - backup

[MartinC]

I am in the process of building my new media server running windows 8.1 as the host OS and various vms running windows server 2012 R2 data center and windows 8.1.

I did try installing Windows 2012 and 2008 as the host but so many drivers missing or not working decided it was a waste of time.

Any way been looking for something that can backup VMWare workstation vms but not found anything yet, use veeam at work but don't support workstation, si was wondering if anyone has come across this situation and night has a product in mind that works well?

Any ideas is also welcome, the host has a large raid 5 for all my media and storing the vms on the ssd with thin provision.

Thanks
Mart

[evilsatan]

I haven't actually tried backing up VMs yet as mine are non-critical but I will be in a similar position to you soon when I build my new ESXi server. I will have my VMs on a RAID5 array but might then add some SSDs in RAID0 to host the VMs if the performance gains are there, this will be the first time I have used a high-end RAID card so not sure what speeds that will give me yet.

Are you looking to use the RAID5 array as the backup target? I would have thought there was a way to have snapshots saved to it so you can quickly restore, not sure if this can happen whilst the VM is in use though, I have only used them in workstation so I can see the OS I am supporting to assist clients more efficiently.

[MartinC]

In the office I look after a 7 cluster ESXi 5.5 u2 datacentre with about 90+ VM's on it, running on a EMC VNX SAN with a 8GB fibre backbone for the HBA's. Most of the VMs run in a storage pool which consists of 2 tiers of disk (15K and 10K), and they are all either RAID 6 or RAID 5, so if the kit/raid controller is high-end with plenty of cache you will do fine with raid 5/6, but you will suffer if it is slow desktop disks in a raid 5, at that point it is defiantly SSD's all the way.

I don't think the benefit for putting SSD in raid is great, and also you got that old story SSD will only work to a certain number of writes, which increases vastly if they are raided, obviously if you must have 100% up time then its the way to go, but you can buy enterprise SSD with a guaranteed life expediency/writes.

We use Veeam at work and it is a nice bit of software but it is not compatible with Workstation or ESXi free, so I cant use it.

snapshots is not really the same as backup, I need to back them up in some way, simply shutdown and copy the files would work fine, but I don't want to bring it down if I can help it, so trying to find a good product for it.

I guess I could grab a copy of our old backup software Backup Exec from work and try it, but I want to find a product built for VMware or at latest virtualisation.

I will probably backup to the Raid 5 or maybe across my network on to another PC/Server.

[MartinC]

Has or does anyone use this software or any of its previous versions?

Acronis backup & recovery 11.5 virtual edition

I might give this ago for a backup product as it has a virtual edition that says it works with VMware Workstation, but I have never used any of their products so wondered if anyone else has?

[evilsatan]

Acronis is decent enough retail software, I used it in the past but for non-VMs I tend to use rsync, clonezilla etc. depending what I need to back up. Can't comment on the virtual version.