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Given a production environment running VMware ESXi 5 and VMware View 5. Given that all components of this system run as VM's inside ESXi 5. After reviewing the VMware view best practices guide the following recommendation is given.

  • Step 1 Back up vSphere
  • Step 2 Back up View Connection Server AD-LDS datastore
  • Step 3 Back up View Composer database
  • Step 4 Back up vCenter database

Is this not rather redundant since all components are themselves running on VM's inside ESXi, and will effectively have been backed up after step 1? If using NexentaStor CE, how do features like ZFS snapshots, auto-tier and auto-sync fit into the backup plan?

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  • You can find it as redundant you you like- however when you call support and you tell them you found the best practices redundant so you didn't bother to perform them, don't be offended by the barely restrained laughing.
    – Jim B
    Dec 12, 2011 at 19:30
  • While that does make sense, I assume there best practices covers a wide scope of use cases. Is it redundant in my use case?
    – cmaduro
    Dec 12, 2011 at 20:04

2 Answers 2

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All of the best practice steps need to be followed as each piece can break/be misconfigured in separate ways. There are no shortcuts.

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What you are doing should work but always run a restore to make sure your backup strategy is good and working. This should be a regularly scheduled event.

We don't the same SAN you have, but we do use Recoverpoint from EMC, which is a cool technology(constantly running snapshots) and \have a quarterly schedule to bring everything up in a secondary site and test it.

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  • What good is testing your restore of the entire environment if your lds environment is hosed- good luck explaining why you have no backup
    – Jim B
    Dec 13, 2011 at 5:55
  • True answer would be it depends. Depends on the particular environment. In our case, we only do step 1 and 4, never had an issue with support. And for our piece of mind, we have done test restores.
    – Mark Vienstein
    Dec 13, 2011 at 11:37
  • I'm not saying you'll have an issue with support in saying there is literally nothing to be done supportwise if you refuse to do the backups specified. Just picking on lds, if you deleted something by accident and cannot do an authoritative restore, your options ate limited and your decisions will be based on how much data loss you can accept rather than the best recovery option.
    – Jim B
    Dec 14, 2011 at 1:23

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