our vpshere hardware:
3x esx dell 710 with FC HBA and 10g Network
1x FAS2040
brocade Fiberchannel Switch 4g FC
Our Backups are done to a qnap nas over 10g which is working fine.
Currently these backups are done from a backup vm...
From there we are doing copy backup jobs to two other nas devices which aren´t already placed off-site...
This whole process is working fine...
Our problem is that our SAN will be out of service and gurantee next year and we are not sure howto plan a
new solution in terms of designing the productive- and backup environment.
What we have in our mind is that it would be nice to have replicates of our productive vm´s. But it´s necessary to have backups too right?
This is the part were it confuses me....
I think the best solution would be....
1. have a new big SAN -> which would have more that 8 TB storage for our productive environment and to
2. have the current (old SAN) as "replicated vm"-SAN in back hand....
but this configuration challenges our budget because a new SAN will costs us about 20 - 50k and
furthermore we still haven´t a tier0 storage from which we
can do fast restores... how are you guys handling this?
We got 2 big VMs which have both 1,5 TB... I don´t want to imagine how much time I would need to recover these from a normal backup...
This is why I liked the idea of replicas a lot.... especially for these machines we are a little bit in luck that they could be backuped with
apllication awareness because they are using MSSQL databases...
The next problem would be that our restore would put quit a lot of stress onto the esx machines, datastores.... and would certainly beeing felt because
of not having a physival server to do backups/restores in case of an emergency right?
What is your recommendation for a small company with 8 TB Fiberchannel Storage and 20 vms in terms of productive environment, backup infrastructure
for the demand of very small RTO and RPO?
Is there somebody of you who could imagine that it would be OK to use the old SAN and only invest in a backup solution with a new hardware backup server with FC HBAS to the old SAN
and start the virtual machines on this new backup server with a lot of CPUs and RAM in case of an emergency from this server?
This would give my the time to install a new SAN but isn´t clearly a good technical approach...
best regards,