What backup solution for Windows 2008 R2 servers on XenServer 5.0?

Question

A friend of mine is hosting a lot of Linux VM's on his servers using XenServer 5.0. He uses rdiff-backup to make daily backups.

I'm trying to convince him to host some Windows VM's (Windows 2008 R2 Web Edition) too, so he could provide (me) .NET hosting. The main problem at the moment is a backup strategy for these Windows VM's.

I would like to see something like a weekly full backup (snapshot of the VM?) with daily incrementals.

I've looked at Windows Backup, but because the backups are made onto network shares it doesn't provide incrementals (for what I understand).

Does anyone has any experience with this situation? How did you solve this in a "not-too-hard-to-install/maintain" way?

Answer 1

Have you looked into DeltaCopy?

Answer 2

ARCserve D2D Beta whose fist version is still in Beta uses iBLI(Block Level Incrementals forever) Backup tachnology. The Beta can be downloaded at the link: http://arcserve.com/us/products/product.aspx?id=8363

Answer 3

I would throw out there QuorumSoft's Alike. It does agentless global block level deduplication, VM replication, etc for any VM type that runs in Xen. They also have a free version available.

Answer 4

Microsoft Data Protection Manager works really well as a virtual machine. The licences are quite affordable too. Only caveat is that it doesn't back up to removable drives and it needs a dedicated volume to backup to (i.e not a folder on a file share).

Answer 5

We use backuppc on a remote host to connect to all our windows and linux boxes (about 40 so far). its free, and open source. It also does file level deduplication, so when several servers have the same copies of our large CVS tree, they dont' take up any more space. Right now, we have 4 weeks of weeklies, and 12 dailies that are taking up about 1.2TB on our server. Uncompressed, and without de-duplication, it would be about 10 TB of data.

it uses rsync for linux, and either SMB for windows, or rsync if you want to mess with it (I just use SMB)

Answer 6

I've gotten R1Soft CDP to work on Xen hosted Windows servers. I had to remove the VSS tool the Xen Tools installed (it caused CDP's VSS writer to fail) but everything worked great. It does block level backups (i.e. deltas), dedupe, and bare metal restores. I did nightly backups (deltas) and fulls on the weekends. This was on a webserver hosting hundreds of sites, so it provided me the ability to go back days or weeks and restore individual files in minutes.

Answer 7

ShadowProtect has always served me well as a complete backup solution.