Backing up ESXi (free) to ESX

[shannonadams68]

Based on suggestions for sales/support, I have the following setup:
10.10.10.246 - production server - running ESX 3i (free) 3.5.0 - internal storage. Server has six running VM's.
10.10.10.245 - standby server - running ESX 3 (foundation license) 3.5.0 - internal storage. Server currently has no VM's.
10.10.10.54 - standalone server running Veeam Backup and FastSCP (full license)

I want to keep my standby server in sync with my production. If there is a hardware failure on the production server, I should be able to start up the VM's on the standby server.

I have added both servers in the Veeam backup interface. To test the backup:
1. Created a new backup job and choose Network backup.
2. Choose all six running VM's to backup from 10.10.10.246.
3. Choose the standby server (10.10.10.245) as destination.
4. Choose /vmfs/volumes/vmware2:storage1 as "Path to folder".
5. Left "VSS intergration" unchecked.

It took about 7 hours to backup the six VM's/149 GB of data. If I set this up run in the scheduler, will it have to backup all 149 GB (or more) each time? Or does it only backup the differences? Any advice on setting this up correctly will be appreciated.

[Gostev]

Hello, what speed do you get when baking up locally to Veeam Backup server? Right now based on provided numbers you are getting only 6MB/s speed and this is much slower than expected. Backing up directly to Veeam Backup server should help to determine whether you get slow speed due to the source, or target ESX storage speed.

Or better yet, you could do this test: using Veeam Backup interface, simply try to download large test file from your production ESXi host, then upload the file to you standby ESX host and let me know what speed you were observing during these 2 operations?

Also, this is not performance related but why are you using backup instead of replication? From your scenario is sounds like you are using standby server for recovery, and replication would let you achieve much faster recovery.