Hi all,
I have a client who is planning to purchase a new server and install ESXi. The plan is to reduce the physical environment (via virtualization) and simpliy backups. However, I need some advice for "simplified backups" portion.
Here's the current idea:
1) New server w/VMWare ESXi 5 on a 4TB RAID Mirror (1 or 10, still deciding)
2) Migrate existing 3 physical Windows servers (all W2K3 in this case)
3) Place VMs and data onto 4TB RAID Mirror
--possibly 1TB for VMs
--remaining 3TB for data
4) Backup solution with another 4TB drive
--external drive (e.g. USB, eSATA, etc.)
--backup entire environment
We're thinking of being able to just backup the entire environment onto an external drive--VMs and all.
This sounds great in theory, but I'm also curious what others think and/or recommend. Would this suffice? If so, is there some VMWare backup that can already do this? Should we still consider separating our VMs physically from our data (e.g. RAID1 for VMs onto some SSD drives, and data on another RAID5 SATA set), even though that would probably take away from the "simplified backup" idea?
Thanks in advance!