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On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Grant Sewell wrote:
What's going on is this - we have a Windows SBS 2008 virtual machine running inside VMWare ESXi. VMWare ESXi is an interesting product but lacks the ability to show physically attached USB drives to any of the guest OSes. The original plan was for SBS 2008 to backup to the USB drives in-turn, so Monday would be on Disk 1, Tuesday on Disk 2, Wednesday on Disk 1, etc, etc. Installing SBS 2008 inside VMWare ESXi, however, put the kybosh on that plan. So now we have the SBS 2008 machine performing regular backups over the network to my machine which is setup to share USB Disk 1 with SAMBA. Since the only things that was mandatory was that one of the disks be taken off-site every night, I decided that Disk 1 should be the primary backup drive and Disk 2 should be a duplicate of it that can be taken off-site every night.
OK... Now, I know little of VMware, and it's like. but couldn't the VMWare host be the one running samba, and it mount the USB drives - with the windows VM seeing the samba share via the "network" connection between the VM and the host?
That might cut-down on wire transfer time and the requirement of a 2nd server..
What about a DROBO on the backup machine with 2 drives in it? (Or even a DROBO with the NAS attachment)
Drive 1 is taped in-place.Backup monkey inserts backup drive in slot 2, waits for the LEDs to go green, then takes it out. You could use several backup drives in this scenario and rotate them as required.
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html