Small business good practice

[AndyBr]

Hi All,
I've just switched jobs (this is a fresh account on this forum but I've been here before). My last job was internal IT for a reasonable sized company (our site had ~150 VM's 7 hosts, vmware enterprise + Veeam + BE + tape library etc.)

My new job involves creating proposals for small businesses: From what I can see previous installations for our customers have taken the shape of esxi free on a tower server with an SBS2011 VM (and perhaps one or two other VMs for specific tasks). Backups have mostly been BE2010 but I would prefer to recommend Veeam to a separate device (Small NAS)?

So, my question is, what small business setup (up to 20 users) would you recommend? How do people in small businesses tend to offsite their backups? Cloud?

TIA

Andy

[veremin]

Hi, Andy,

From what I can see previous installations for our customers have taken the shape of esxi free on a tower server with an SBS2011 VM (and perhaps one or two other VMs for specific tasks).

Please, be aware that Free version of ESX(i) isn't supported by Veeam Backup and Replication since it has certain vSphere API blocked. You have to use paid ESX(i) version in order to utilize VB&R.

How do people in small businesses tend to offsite their backups? Cloud?

Yep, cloud becomes a popular strategy these days. So, you might want to consider Veeam Backup Cloud Edition. VB&R CE turns overwhelming majority of public storage cloud into an easy-to-use data repository for backups. It's cloud-agnostic, with about 15 different public clouds being supported.

Thanks.

[emachabert]

You should look to VMware Essential kit + Veeam Essential, it is afordable for small businesses.
You could also switch from VMware to Hyper-V to reduce costs.