My organization is fairly small and we're exploring our enterprise backup solution options. I've been tasked with coming up with an approach that meets certain requirements, one of those being nightly backups of all our hosts. We're a windows shop so I started investigating Windows Backup, but I'm not excited by my options there as it either requires pushing hundreds of gigabytes unnecessarily across the network each night, or using shadow copies to track changes to files which imposes a significant write penalty. We run vSphere 5.5, and I started looking at the options VPD gives us. I was particularly interested in how Changed Block Tracking might be a good option for our situation. One sticking point is that on certain hosts where we keep our database data files, I need to exclude those vmdks from backups and CBT (the database backups are going to be what we'd use in recover anyway). Is this an option? All the literature presents CBT as either "all-on" or "all-off" when it comes to the vmdks, but also doesn't explicitly say that a heterogeneous CBT configuration for disks is out of the question.
Thanks!