vmware Data Recovery questions

Question

We are using vmware Data Recovery appliance for backing up our virtual machine. I read the whole vDR Administration guide, but some of my questions are still unanswered.

1) If vDR appliance crashes, and I will have to install the new one and set the original destinations, will the vDR recognize the old backups?

2) I definitely quit backing up to CIFS share, as there were problems with mounting/unmouting the share lately, vDR was freezing as well. Are there any reasons why not to store the vDR VM backups directly on the host the vDR is running ? According to the Administration guide, this has better performance within vDR, but are there any major overall performance impacts on the host while making the backups in comparison with CIFS ? (waiting for I/O?)

Answer 1

1) Yes, I believe so, all data and indexes are kept on the 'destinations'. Im guessing the new VDR would do an integrity check and learn all restore points.

2) No, as long as the backups are not on the same storage as the virtual machines, if you'd like to be able to restore in case the storage housing the virtual servers die.
I don't understand the last question. CIFS is pretty damn slow, so every other alternative (iscsi, fc, nfs, das, local attached storage) is way faster.. Does that answer you question?

I've had people tell me not to use vdr as the only backup strategy (no matter if data is copied to multiple disk systems). Not sure why, might be some problems in the past with 3.x versions of esx/vcenter.

Edit: I do combine VDR with another solution.