Hi All,
It seems that VMWare and many of the surrounding programs are geared towards multi-million dollar datacenters, where I am sure they are doing wonderful things. However, for the last 5 years we have been focusing on bringing VMWare to small businesses. The problem that we are hitting now is backups…
Most of our installs are running vSphere Essentials 5 (some running on 4). Some time ago we got on the bandwagon of vRanger – it did everything we needed. On the fly backup of live running VMs, restoration of whole VM, or granular restores via mounting the old VM and extracting what's needed. I know it’s not as fancy as some of the other options with intelligent de-duplication and whatnot, but it worked great for our needs.
The problem is that Dell bought vRanger and a product that used to cost us $350 to license for 10 sockets spread out amongst as many machines as we wanted, now is billed per core and comes out to about $3,800 for the same end result. And Dell is pretty much killing the product – our sales reps there didn’t even know what vRanger was and I can only imagine what would happen if we needed to call someone for support… It took the better part of the week for them to even send us pricing!
We also looked at veem, but again it is just too pricey and complete overkill for us. We dont need a software that managers a million VMs spread out over thousands of servers on 4 continents. Our installs are 1-5 physical machines sharing a rack in a basement. vSphere+ seems to have a good built-in backup system, but it costs about $5k, which is also way out of our budget.
I thought the whole purpose of vmware was to make this kind of stuff cheap and easy – over the past few years it seems that with M$FT redefining their EULA’s and vmWare charging obscene amounts of money for what should be simple utilities, it is putting the technology out of reach of small business. At this point its pretty much sheaper to use something like BackupAssist on a physical box and call it good.
We are starting to look at either using OS-level backups (Windows backup, as sad as that may be), or just moving aware from virtualization altogether.
I am really hoping that someone could point me to a software that can do on-the-fly backups of the VMDK files that does not cost an arm, a leg and a nut.