Backup Exec support for ESXi (free)
HI,
we have 1 customer who has 2 VMWare ESXi 5.0 Hypervisors with the free license of VMWare. We were backing up these ESXi 5.0 machines with Symantec back-up Exec 2010 R3 which worked fine. We could back-up the machines and granulary restore files from these back-ups. We even had Symantec Support work on a case where the back-ups were failing due to misconfiguration.
Recently we have upgraded 1 of these 2 ESXi hosts to VMWare ESXi 5.5 u1 and the back-ups started failing. We were advised to upgrade to Backup Exec 2012 and we did.
After we upgraded to Backup Exec 2012 we were still getting the same errors for this particular host. The VMs from the ESXi 5.0 host were backing up without any issues.
We then found out that in order for back-up Exec 2012 to be able to back-up ESXi 5.5 u1 we would need a VMWare standard license because Backup Exec 2012 uses the Vstorage API.
if we were to downgrade the ESXi (free) 5.5 u1 host to ESXi (free) 5.1 u3, would we be able to back-up the VMs on this host again with Back-up Exec 2012 VMWare integration?