What is the best and most cost-effective way to backup an entire VSphere 5 host (includinng all VMs) for later recovery in the event of host hardware failure. I have RAID 5 or 6 (I forget which), but I recently lost three (yes three!) drives on an eight drive array so I lost a lot of VMs. So in addition to RAID I want to do regular weekly backups of the entire host.
What is the best way to do that? Is it done through the vSphere server console? Is there a stand-alone utility? Other?
Is a large external USB or Firewire drive the best idea?
What have people had success with in terms of backing up (and restoring!) the host?
Thanks.