We're looking for a backup solution for our vSphere environment. We currently have 5 hosts using a shared iSCSI storage system. We have about 25 VMs (which may be trimmed down to about 20 or less) each with provisioned storage ranging from 25GB to as much as 140GB. Each datastore were using is configured at about 500GB and we've employed HA/DRS in this environment.
I'm a bit confused as to the configurations of VDP (vSphere Data Protection) and deploying the appliance(s) into this environment. From what I've gathered, there are 3 versions of VDP (the free version): 0.5TB, 1TB, and 2TB version, where each requires a bit more space for installation, and I read in the Admin guide that up to 25 VMs can be supported per TB, but it doesn't indicate or associate how much or how large those VMs can be, nor the datastore configurations associated with the VMs, the VDP appliance itself, and the storage necessary for backing everything up. So this leads to some questions I have and some dumbed-down explanation for someone new to this:
- It looks like you can deploy more than one appliance as necessary. Is this true? (in the case that at some point in the future, our VM counts exceed or approach capacity of the appliance maximums)
- Since our current VMs are spread out over multiple 500GB datastores, and, for example, we decide to go with the 1TB VDP appliance, do we need to create 1TB+ datastores to first deploy each VDP applaince?
- - How does this factor into HA and DRS? If a host that the VDP appliance is running on goes down or moving the appliance to a different datastore is necessary, wouldn't we need to have many 1TB+ datastores available for DRS?
- Based on our info provided, what configuration/deployment strategy would you suggest for us?
- This is apparently a local backup solution (disk). How can we allow this system (or what can we integrate with it) to do offsite backups for disaster recovery? Is this possible [using a VPN to some remote storage system such as an offsite datastore or SAN]?
- Is this a good system for single-host vSphere deployments as well? (We also have other single-host ESXi environments that will also require backup solutions, but in some cases have storage of no more than 1TB after RAID configuration)