We're currently running ESX 3.5 U4 Standard and using esXpress for VM backups.
I'm tempted by the special vSphere upgrade offer that would see us able to move to advanced for a reasonable price.
This would give us vMotion, Fault Tolerance (the main benefits) and Data Recovery.
Data Recovery looked neat, it looked like it could replace esXpress and save us some money on tech support and yet another product to have to know/manage, however reading various forums including this one, it just plain doesn't sound suitable for production - I'm reading stories of people unable to do any backups for days whilst it does "integrity checks", SMB backups being unreliable, basically a bunch of horror stories.
I know people tend to come to forums when they have a problem, so is there a balance to this and are these people in the minority?
I ask as until I'm able to upgrade one of our boxes to vSphere it's obviously impossible to try this out for myself - any feedback appreciated.