There’s been lots of chatter recently about VMware Data Recovery and how it sizes up against its competitors.
The people over at the VMTN community forums are in full swing debating the topic.
A few questions that cropped up about vSphere Data recovery were:
1. “Are independent and portable backups produces.i.e. a tar file to spin to tape or offsite disk vault.”
2. “How ingrained in the data deduplication and will this limit portability of vm backups for offsite DR.”
Yellow Bricks own VMGuru Duncan Epping came swooping in to anwser these:
A1: “The backups are stored in a VMDK which is attached to the VM. (You can probably use an RDM as well), So no direct backup to tape from VMware Data Recovery”
A2: “The Dedupe and it’s index is stored on the same VMDK. You could copy the VMDK offsite for DR. If anything goes wrong it’s to my understanding that you can attach the VMDK to a new DR VM and reuse the data.”
Nice work Duncan 
Tom Howarth of Planetvm.net (and VMware Communities User Moderator) also suggested people might like to check out esXpress!
