Damien, I've used esXpress for about 1.5 years and I highly recommend it. All in all, it's a fast, inexpensive, and easy to use product. I back up to an 8TB NAS box via FTP then copy full backups to external USB drives weekly for off-site storage. You can backup to a VMFS volume, or use FTP, NFS, or SMB. esXpress has always worked flawlessly, it's easy to configure, and you don't need the program to restore a backup. The delta backups are executable with code to restore themselves. I purchased their file level backup (FLB) option about 7 months ago which allows you to zip up files and/or directories within a Windows VM client. I use it for keeping archives of files such. The FLB isn't sophisticated but it works well.
They also have great support forums. Usually questions are answered by the esXpress staff within minutes of being posted. You may want to read through some of the forum questions. It's a good resource and it may give you a better idea of what others are doing with the product. I highly suggest you try it out. You can download a free copy of esXpress from their website. It will take you about 10 minutes to set up and it won't "pollute" your ESX host should you decide not to use it. -Jeff ________________________________ From: Damien Solodow [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 5:22 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: ESX backup solutions? We are looking at some packages for backups and the like of ESX guests. Most things I've seen say that VCB comes up a bit short, and the two products I've seen much about are vRanger, and esXpress. Any experiences, anecdotes, etc on either of these? Other options worth looking into? Damien Solodow, MCSE Senior System Administrator Infrastructure Services Group Information Services Indiana Business College [EMAIL PROTECTED]<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Direct - (317) 217-6881 We are the Foundation of how Business Gets Done! ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
