Vsphere Essentials upgrade - Essentials plus or Veeam Essen

[rwalkerphl]

Hi All.

New here. I have just setup a 6 CPU vSphere environment using vSphere essentials. I am now realizing I need something more robust, and am wondering whether an upgrade to vSphere Essentials to to get HA and vMotion, or to go with Veeam Essentials backup with the ability to move VM's.

Any advice is gratefully received.

Thanks!
Robin.

[Shestakov]

Hi Robin and welcome to the forums!,

If you want to Move a VMware VM from one host to another without VMware vMotion, you can leverage Veeam Quick migration tool.
Quick Migration is included in all editions of Veeam backup products.
Replication and planned failover are also included in the standard package.

Is that what you were looking for? Thanks!

[Vitaliy S.]

Additionally, please let us know if you have any regulations in terms of VM backup verification, on-demand sandboxes to do testing before applying changes to the production infrastructure etc.

[rwalkerphl]

This is for my small business where we demonstrate and develop around Oracle E Business Suite (using applications and databases) and associated products. My primary needs are to ensure VMs stay up, move them around to ensure best use of resources, and back ups to be able to rapidly bring machines online that have crashed. I am currently running 3 x DL385 set up as a cluster, and an iSCSI attached Synology NAS. I also have a Thecus NAS NFS mounted I am thinking about using for backups - it can be ISCSI mounted too, if needed.

Am I also thinking about cost (my revenue is well under $1MM at this point). If I go with Veeam essentials, it looks like $2.5k or so for 6 sockets, or upgrading to vSphere Essentials Plus that gives vMotion and High Availability and Data Protection, but is closer to $5k.

As I mentioned, this is pretty new to me - I am migrating from VirtualBox to vSphere, and it's a whole different situation.

If anyone can point me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks!
Robin.

[Shestakov]

vSphere essentials + Veeam standard essentials combo looks like a reasonable choice for you. vMotion and HA are helpful tools, but you need backups for a reliable data protection.
Here is our best practices by the way.
You may be also interested in Veeam ONE free edition for the infrastructure monitoring.
Thanks!

[Vitaliy S.]

This comparison table should come in handy, please take a look > https://www.veeam.com/backup-version-st ... rison.html

[rwalkerphl]

Hi guys,

Many thanks for the responses. Just to enable me to get a handle on this, can you confirm my understanding of what is provided with the Backup essentials package:

1. I can back up all vm's, and do incremental backups
2. I can restart a vm from the back up rapidly
3. I can move machines from host to host rapidly

FYI, I am talking VM's that may have disks 1TB or more in size.

Many thanks,
Robin.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, your understanding is correct, but for Veeam quick migration task moving VM data will take time in accordance to the size of the VM. I would suggest to install a trial key and see all functionality yourself.

[rwalkerphl]

Thanks Vitaliy,

I just reviewed the evaluation doc for the backup and recovery product, and I just have a couple of questions:

1. It appears you need 3 servers to set up that application:

Windows server for console
Windows server for backup proxy
Windows/Linux Server for backup repository

Can the proxy and the console be same same machine?

2. Can all the servers be VM's?
3. If I have 3 Hosts, can I license 2 for backup, and use the third as the repository, or do I need to license all 3?

I am intending on doing a set up in the next week. I happen to be located right by Atlanta, and I see the North American office is there too. I wonder if it would be possible to get with someone to talk this through based upon my environment?

Thanks!
Robin.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Robin,

1. Yes, you can deploy all these components in a single box (typical installation).
2. Yes, absolutely.
3. You need to license all source ESXi hosts you're backing up VMs from. If 3rd server is not used for production VMs, then you don't need to license it.

Yes, you can reach out to our sales rep in Atlanta and they will be able to connect you to one of our local system engineers.

Thanks!

[Shestakov]

Just a quick note that despite you can use VM as a backup repository we don't recommend to store backups on VMFS.