I bought a box of Frosted Flakes recently - this was a departure from my usual diet of Froot Loops, I make my life very exciting with these spontaneous bursts of adventure. One thing I noticed on my box of Frosted Flakes was a big bright bubble that said, "Less sugar!" and in much smaller letters beneath it, "than original Frosted Flakes." This is of course a meaningless comparison. Less sugar than the original may still mean "way too much sugar."
In the technology industry, one of the tactics software companies sometimes use to increase the chance of closing a sale is "FUD": Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, which basically means injecting misleading information into a sale process. There has been some interesting FUD circulating around backup vendor support for VMware's ESX and ESXi platforms. ESXi and ESX are essentially identical from a functionality perspective. To quote VMware.com, "VMware ESXi has the same functionality and performance as VMware ESX but with a 32 MB disk footprint.” A significant difference is that ESXi eliminates the Service Console.
VCB works with both ESX and ESXi, and any backup vendor that integrates with VCB will automatically be able to backup both ESX and ESXi. NetBackup falls in that category. So in summary, NetBackup does support ESX and ESXi ... and in fact has done so since ESXi was introduced! NetBackup can also backup from inside the guest VM, from on the Service Console, or from the proxy server via VCB. NetBackup can even introduce deduplication into these configurations.
And that is almost as tasty as reduced-sugar Frosted Flakes.
Message Edited by Daniel Hoffer on 01-14-2009 04:44 PM
