BESR 2010 Best Practice for my situation.

[Rohaizad]

Hi,

I need to know whats the best practice for my case.
I have 3 servers AD & file , Exchange & another Linux machine, all the machine have at least 300GB of data. So total of data involved should be around 1TB.
We plan to use Symantec BESR 2010 to backup the all the server's image and store it into the SAN box. And for the recovery we will be restoring the images to the EXSi 4.0 server.
So this is all the general idea about what we are going to have. For the recovery process, I only have a window of 4 hours for the whole process (for AD & file only). Please advise on the best way to archive this.

[criley]

Best way to achieve this? Test it to see if this is a realistic expectation. It's very difficult to say how long the restore will take as there are many environmental factors that impact on performance.

NOTE: You have 2 options if you are restoring to a virtual environment; you can either restore into a new/empty VM or convert your recovery points to VMDK (this cannot be done with Linux however).

Hope this helps.

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[Rohaizad]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply, however I have a few follow up questions :

1 ) Which is faster , restoring to VM or converting ? Last time I tried conversion, it took me about 2 hours to convert 40GB of image. (using not so powerful machine) Possible to convert a 300GB image within 6-7 hours max ? (with quite high end server)

2) Which conversion tools you normally use ? Use the Symantec Manager/Client to convert ? Or you can recommend other software instead ?

3) I never explore the Manager yet, is it possible to automate the convertion and do a restoration to a VM in the case where the actually machine crash/failed ?.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Thanks.

[criley]

Which is faster? In my experience, restoring into a VM has been faster but it all depends on your environment. As mentioned previously, I would recommend you do some testing to see which works best for you.

You can use either the client (BESR) or the manager (BESR-MS) to do the conversion (note; the manager just 'co-ordinates' the conversion. you still need a client to do the actual work).

Hope that helps.

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