backup to offsite location

[dirtdevil01]

Can data recovery backup vms to an offsite location via ip and not vcenter? I have a storage server that has ftp, samba, nfs and ssh but it's not in vcenter, it's a bare metal linux box in another data center. So the pie in the sky solution would be data recovery makes automated backups to my storage server over the internet. And from data recovery, I can still see a neat list of all the archived vms. If I need to restore a backup, I can still do it from data recovery. So a transparent way to offsite my backups in data recovery.

[FranckRookie]

Hi Dirtdevil01,

Well, I never tested it, but you can have VDR using a remote CIFS datastore. I don't know if, when you connect the datastore, it checks whether the share is on the same subnet... I think you may need to have enough network bandwidth between the two sites not to have time outs during the backup. But it could be interesting to give it a try.

Let us know if you test it.

Regards

Franck

[AndreTheGiant]

CIFS shares are supported as destionation of VDR backup.

As written in the previous post, you can some some issue if you have bandwith problem.

Andre

[dirtdevil01]

Bandwidth shouldn't be an issue since both sites are on the same provider network. Is using CIFS transparent to data recovery? I can still view the archived downloads, restore, backup etc etc like I would if I was using local storage?

[AndreTheGiant · Accepted solution]

Connect to your VDR with the vSphere Client (and VDR plugin).

Under destination settings, add a new network destionation.

Use
IP\share if you NAS is not in a DNS record.

Andre

[FranckRookie]

Once your VDR is connected to the remote share (if it works), backup and restore should be the same as with local storage (except maybe the time needed because of the WAN connection).

Franck

[dsoltesz]

We have always replicated our backups offsite, but we have used Rsync. You can get rysnc for windows/linux, or you can use robocopy. Both can send only the data that has changed compressed across a WAN link. (even within a file)

Our WAN link is 10mbps which is too small for backups to do live, but a rsync after the backup works fine. It turns out that the I/O is the biggest hit, not the bandwidth, as rysnc is looking for changes to send across the link.

This works fine with both vDR and esXpress. We have used both in our environment.