Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 New Virtualization Features
Sep.23, 2008 in
General, VMware, Virtualization
Symantec has released Backup Exec 12.5 with new VMware and Hyper-V agents. Here is the new features for the agents from Symantec.
Comprehensive Data Protection for VMware Infrastructures and Microsoft Virtual Servers
Expanded virtual server data protection with two new virtual Agents
Backup Exec Agent for VMware Virtual Infrastructures and Backup Exec Agent for Microsoft Virtual Servers (including Hyper-V)
Quickly restore virtual server files and folders from a single pass backup – save time and storage costs by eliminating a redundant file level backup
Easily backup an unlimited number of virtual guest machines to disk or tape for added flexibility and savings
Fast, efficient data protection for physical and virtual server environments from a single console
This is great news for those of us that use Backup Exec.
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December 5th, 2008 at 10:46 am
I’ve been using Backup Exec for many years now and have been using VCB backups since VI3 was released. This is a welcome addition to Backup Exec, but I was suprised to see the cost associated with the new virtual agent in relation to the benefit. The quote I received for new agents was over $2,000 per ESX host. If you are like me and running several clusters (I have 10 ESX hosts) this can end up costing more than the entire BackupExec suite. They have added the ability to browse to your VMs and avoid writing scripts, and the ability to restore an individual file from a full VM backup. You still can’t, however, do an incremental or differential backup, which means you still need to have windows (and sql, exchange, etc) agents to do any daily backups. IMHO, this should have been an improvement to their standard product and not an added agent, or maybe a single agent associated with the vcenter server. For me the price tag is way too high for the limited added benefit.
December 5th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Steve I agree with you on this issue. After doing more research into this feature it seems to be a let down. With backups in VMware I would like to move away from agent based backup solutions. Most agent based solutions take up a decent amount of resources and in turn more overhead on the ESX server. We are currently looking at some different combinations through Netapp SMVI etc.
December 16th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Thank you for commenting on the excessive cost of Symantec’s products. I looked at this too and decided to continue with our esXpress backups, from which I can now do file backups.