i sent this to our veritas rep.... but thought it was worthy of more eyes...
I downloaded the trial of VSR 16 and the PL file to use in Altiris was in there. Use Altiris to point to it then it showed up for install. Our licenses also took…
So since its been a while I do want to give you a feature request – one that would keep the product around as we are discussing getting rid of it now or seriously cutting back our licenses even more. We originally had 4000 and would have kept buying more but the limitations in this product is one that just can’t be overlooked.
Call me anytime (even with whoever you want on the line to listen in) and I can discuss in more detail. I will most likely put this feature request on the forums for it to be heard as well.
Originally “Altiris” , the actual company name as it was, had Recovery Solution and when Symantec purchased Altiris they deemed the product not worthy and EOL’d it.
https://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/readyaltiris-recovery-solution
That was such a shame as my team and I all agree that SSR (replacement for RS) had nothing credible to take its place and still does not. I just installed VSR 16 on a machine and installed the client side as well. We are using at most 37 of our 1000 remaining licenses and even VSR 16 does not have the excludes that would be nice. I did however see that you can “Include” what to backup on a manual run, however that is not beneficial to what we would want.
RS features that outshine VSR and would be a great feature request are as follows:
- Folder level exclusions
- File type exclusions
- Ability to dedupe
With this our 4200 machines utilized (trying to remember) like 4.2TB of space across all of our servers. We actually had an RS server at each site so they would not have to copy files over the wan from slower sites. Today VSR 16 would require us to need some ridiculous number… I forget what it was but I do recall the quote was an initial $1M for SAN space.
What RS did great was when you backed up a machine, it copied all of the files into BLOB files. Then marked the SQL database with where the file is, etc…. then when machine #2 did its backup… RS would check and instead of copying EVERY file, it simply just copied the different files into more BLOB files and marked the DB. In addition the files that the machine had that were the same simply just got marked in the DB as the machine has them.
With VSR 16 it is a full system backup. I understand it does not backup the pagefile.sys or hibernation file, but other than that it backs up pretty much everything. So for 10 machines each with a drive 15GB full… VSR 16 will need 150GB of space to store files (I know compression changes this) but RS would do the 15GB then only different files so in actuality could be anywhere from 15.01GB to 20GB or higher…
In addition you could set to do full backups, incremental and differential backups. We did a full backup then a differential…. And had a month worth of backups…
I remember part of the conversation when we talked with Symantec (and not sure we had a meeting with Veritas) to explain our needs and concerns. That conversation was started with something that most recovery solution providers don’t hear often….
WE DO NOT CARE ABOUT DATA!!!!!! The term Big Data is thrown around everywhere lately… all the data acquired, all the data everywhere… data data data…. But us.. Data = nope…
We have a system in place to move/archive data off of the systems. Our specific need for a recovery solution is simple… machine goes down from a drive failure or bad patch and we can recover the machine back to an original state. Originally when we were on XP (still have some), we had vendors that are out of business and no way for us to get the system back online unless we could RS the drive back…. Today we are gambling and getting the clients to replace their systems/software with newer versions from a vendor in business. We did get some push back as some of these systems are old P4 computers running XP; however, they also are connected to a $500k instrument!!!!!!
Well that should be enough for now. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns….
