Many of my customers have very simple installs with a single SAN.
I have a test environment right now where I have 2 esxi hosts and a san. One of the hosts has a local datastore. I am using the local datastore to house VDP and my backups. The idea being 1 this is a lab and 2 if i lose the SAN i probably wont lose the local datastore.
That being said i have 2 issues.
1. First i cannot add the vcenter server to the backup job. I suppose this could possibly be by design given my next question
2. Can you restore anything without the vcenter server? The file level recovery allows you to log directly into the VDP appliance from a protected host. My main purpose of a vm level backup is to restore everything if i lose the datastore. So if i have a virtualized vcenter server (i assume most do) and i lose my primary datastore i am going to lose both the protected virtual machines and the vcenter server. I have not going to lose the VDP data since it would reside on a seperate datastore. Can you initiate a restore directly from the VDP appliance without vcenter? If not this seems like a glaring oversite that should be changed. I would prefer to be able to backup vcenter with VDP and initiate a restore of vcenter directly from the VDP appliance if i lose everything.
Also are there any plans to make vdp managed from the vcenter client, the web client is not that great compared to the standard client.