Getting VMs to secondary SAN

[serigraph]

Hello,
Forgive a redundant post but I have been reading the forums on this topic and similar for the past couple of weeks and would like some advice/clarification on what to do. There seems to be many options/scenarios out there but the more I read the more uncertain I am of what is best option/practice.

My setup:
3 esxi vSphere 4.1 hosts connect to EMC VNX 5300 via NFS datastores.
25 VMs currently, mix of Windows 2003 P2V'd and Win2K8R2. Couple of SQL no Exchange yet but soon. will probably have 35-40 vms when totally setup/converted.
Currently running VBR version 5.02.230 as a VM.
Have jobs setup for SQL vms, 2K8 vms, and 2K3 vm's. All running in Virtual appliance mode and reversed incremental with 7 restore points.
Have a separate datastore just for VBR vm and backup files. these are in same datastore mounted as a local drive in VBR vm.
Have been running this for couple months with good speeds and no failed jobs.

I don't have a true offsite DR site as of yet. soon. I do have a secondary Equallogic SAN that I created a 1TB volume on. I have mounted this volume via iscsi to my VBR vm.

As a DR measure I would like to use this volume on my EQL SAN for my vms in case my emc san blewup I would be covered to with my current vm's not being gone.
We also have Backup Exec 12.5 in place for our physical server backup and would like to use that in some capacity to backup the vmdk's to tape and include in our off site tape rotation.

Ok. onto my actual question.

Should I just create a second setup of backup jobs (mimic current ones) and point those to my volume on my EQL SAN? Run these after my first set finishes? Then use Backup Exec to back these up to tape to take off site?
Should I create VM Copy jobs instead and point those to my volume on my EQL? Then use Backup Exec to backup to tape to take off site?

I understand that with VBR backup job I will get compression and dedupe so better disk space utilization. just not clear with this, if I had to restore from tape how that would work yet.
If i do VM copy I would use more disk space but would have uncompressed/undeduped files and could bring them up on different host if needed.
Eventually I will have secondary site with SAN and 1 or 2 hosts so I could implement the replication feature at that point. But for now I want to cover myself in event of main SAN failure.

Anyone care to give suggestions to my situation or what they may have done that would apply to what I am looking to do? Any feedback would be much appreciated other than telling me to read the forums.
Sorry for the long post but to give as much info as possible.

Thanks
Bruce

[hatrick]

Did you ever come up with a workable solution for this? I have a similar situation ans have had similar thoughts about using Symantec since we own it and it is a robust solution. I have 3 hosts on a single SAN and have just purchased a QNAP NAS to be used to store backups at a remote site. The remote site is just a WAN segment connected with GB fiber but no VMWARE environement.

I have the ability to use the NAS as a SMB share or connect it with iSCSI. My questions is that the VEEAM user guide says that I should place a Veam Backup Server at the remote site and connect the NAT to that server. I am not sure the exact reasoning for this as it seems like I could use VEEAM to write or replicate the files directly. I am curious on your thoughts.

[foggy]

Bruce, have you considered using synchronization tools (like rsync, for example) to replicate backup files to a secondary location? A lot of our customers do utilize them successfully in similar situations (no way to avoid forum search in this case though ). Regarding your recovery misgivings, we have a standalone utility (called extract.exe) coming with every VBR installation that allows to restore VMs from any VBK file created by VBR, in case you do not have the product installed.

[serigraph]

Hello,
Thanks for the reply. have been away from this working on other items.

What I did for now was create a second set of backups to mimic my first set and have them pointed to my EQL SAN. So I at least have a secondary backup in case my primary SAN has a problem.

I did see others were using rsync and I will look into that as well.
I haven't had chance to do a backup to tape yet from the EQL SAN with backup exec.
Hopefully this coming week I can get back to spending more time on this and come up with some more questions.
Thanks again for the reply's.