sanity check for dual-esxi setup?

[danswartz]

Two esxi 5.1 hosts in lab setup. Each host will have ZFS storage appliance serving datastores to both hosts via NFS. The idea is that a VM running on host X is using a VMDK on that host's storage appliance. One host is 'production' one is backup. Idea is to run veeam replication from production host => backup host. Once a month, plug an esata drive into my windows 7 workstation and manually run a backup job (most likely forward incremental) of all VMs (except the two storage appliances, since they have HBA's passed in via PCI passthrough.) Does this seem reasonable?

[Gostev]

Hi Dan, yes your plan sounds reasonable to me. Thanks!

[danswartz]

thx!

[danswartz]

Here's what I decided to do:

1. Hourly replication (up to 12 restore points) from Production Host => Backup Host
2. Daily backup (forward incremental with Saturday Full Backups) from Production Host => Production Host
3. Monthly backup (Always full with up to 4 restore points) from Production Host => eSata drive on my Win7 server.

I've only had #1 and #2 working so far, but it seems solid...

[danswartz]

A minor tweak: given each replication restore point is only doing a few GB tops, I changed the 12 to 24. This way, going back for a full day, I have replicas, prior to that, backups.

[Gostev]

Thanks for sharing. This is a solid data protection strategy, especially if you are planning on taking your monthly backups off-site on that eSATA drive.

[veremin]

3. Monthly backup (Always full with up to 4 restore points) from Production Host => eSata drive on my Win7 server.

Additionally, in case of taking backups offsite using rotated drives it stands to reason to take a look at the existing discussion which is primarily concerned with such scenario.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.