CDP, HA, Snapshotting

FDS123 · Mon Sep 19, 2011 6:37 pm

I am in the process of evaluation the starwind software and I'm a newbie at this and was hoping someone could help me with a little understanding of the setup. My primary use of starwind would be as shared/external storage for an ESXi enviornment.

I have created an iscsi target on a windows machine and I have this target mounted in esxi which are running some of vmy's.

My first question is, how would I go about backing up this .img file?

How do I perform a file level restore from one of the VM's in a situation like this?

Do i have to set up another windows box running starwind to get this done?

At this point I'm not looking to set up HA to mirror the .img file, but rather backing up of the .img file to where I can mount it in some way to access the vm's on it, and perform file level restore etc

Thanks,

Future Data

Mon Sep 19, 2011 9:22 pm

OK, let's go step by step.

1) It's not possible to have a snapshot for HA volume now. You will be with upcoming StarWind version but not with current up-to-date V5.7 we sell.

2) Restoring one VM image from target content and restoring complete snapshot (multiple VMs) are quite different things. Very few SANs allow recovery of individual VM images. Good news - StarWind will do what you want with V5.8 and up. May apply for beta now.

3) It's recommended to have a dedicated backup application for ESX rather then messing with SAN backups. Dedicated backups are more flexible and allow much more then simple recovery and restore process. I would personally recommend VEEAM.