[newbie here] Best backup strategy

[maxfontana]

Hi there.
My company has recently purchased Vmware Essential and Veeam Essential (already upgraded for free to essential plus version).
Unfortunately our budget was not so high and we couldn't afford a San as shared storage so we bought 2 servers with local storage and a Nas iomega ix4-200r as backup device.
There are only 6 running vms (kerio mail server, linux file server, win2008 r2 for Besx, veeam installed on a win7 64bit and 2 old vms based on win2000).
I've configured 6 backup jobs, each using reverse incremental method and backing up to the Iomega Nas every night and every vm has been replicated on both esxi hosts.
I'm just curious to know and to hear from you what would be the best backup/replication strategy to choose with this scenario.
Can I somehow use the Istant vm, recovery feature or is it impracticable with my hardware configuration?
Many thanks in advance.
Max
Italy

[Gostev]

Hi Max, your stategy looks fine for environment of your size. Good idea to do cross-replication of all VMs between both hosts. All vPower functionality is perfectly practicle with your configuration, too - you can definitely use it if needed. Thanks!

[maxfontana]

Hi Max, your stategy looks fine for environment of your size. Good idea to do cross-replication of all VMs between both hosts. All vPower functionality is perfectly practicle with your configuration, too - you can definitely use it if needed. Thanks!

Thanks for answering. So, regarding the Vpower functionality, it means that in the case of a physical host crash, I can immediately recover a backed up vm on my second esxi working host without the need to wait for the entire restore process to complete (I mean, if the backup tooks 2 hrs, do I have to wait 2hrs for the restore or not) ?
thanks again!
Max
Italy

[Alexey D.]

Yes, you don't have to wait for these hours.
Here is what User Guide says:

"For instant VM recovery, Veeam Backup & Replication uses vPower engine that mounts a VM image to an ESX host directly from a compressed and deduplicated backup file. To finalize VM recovery, you can vMotion it or replicate to the production datastore and then fail over to this replica during the next maintenance window."

So, your recovery can be done just in couple of minutes, not hours.
Take a look at User Guide, page 20 for further reading on this topic. Thanks!

[Gostev]

Max, please review sticky FAQ topic, it answers most questions you may have as newbie. There is whole section dedicated to Instant VM Recovery. Thanks!