Your Advice would be appreciated

[BTS-JL]

Greetings... and before I start... Thanks for any help I recieve.

I'll be honest.  I'm lost.

We have 2 ESX3.5i servers (with VCB) and are soon moving to 2 vSphere servers with a vCentre Server.

Our virtual machines are all Windows 2003 with AD, Exchange 2003, MS SQL etc on various servers.

All images are stored on the iscsi SAN.

Now my problem is that there are so many agents I don't know what I need.

Ideally, we'd like to backup each image (so thats the AVVI pluggin ?) but do I also need the pluggins for exchange, sql etc as they are VSS aware.

Thanks for your help.

[Hemant_Jain · Accepted solution]

With Backup Exec 12.5, we give you granular recovery of Virtual machines if you use AVVI for backups of virtual machines. Please note that this granular recovery option would help you restore only files and folders on the virtual machines. But, if you would like to backup SQL, Exchange and AD and as agents, you would need to buy SQL Agent, Exchange agent and Active Directory recovery agent(if you would like to restore granular informaiton of active directory from system state backup). Also, remote agent would be requried on the virtual machines. So, if you use AVVI, you can backup the entire virtual machine and restore entire virtual machine or individual files, folders inside the machine. If using individual agents, you can back them up as a regular SQL, Exchange or AD machine.

Please mark it a solution, if this is useful.

Thanks