Well, there are a few pieces to the puzzle you’ll need, but here is a nice little solution you can put together for not a lot of money. For the purposes of my example I’ll use HP servers, but you can fill in the blanks with your own vendor of choice. Everything mentioned here is on the VMware HCL(hardware compatibility list).

First of all, here are the ingredients you’ll need:

• vSphere 4 Essentials
• Veeam Backup and Replication
• QNAP 459 Pro network attached storage device with some fast 1 TB hard drives
• Two HP ML350 tower servers or two DL380 rack mount servers with maxed out local SAS storage, redundant fans and power supplies, and upgraded battery backed cache with advanced iLO for remote management.
• HP 1810 series 24 port gigabit switch

So what I would do is setup the two servers of your choice with VMware installed on them, and use the tons of local storage as the storage place for your virtual machines. For the purposes of this example we’ll call the first server “server1″ and the second server “server2″.

Then create a vCenter server that is virtualized. This server can also act as your management box. Install Veeam Backup and Replication on this management server. Configure the QNAP device on your network using iSCSI and mount it so the management VM can mount the storage as a drive letter.

Setup Veeam to run backup jobs to the QNAP device and then setup Veeam to run replication jobs from server1 to server2 and vice versa.

Voila! You end up with external backups to the QNAP device, and you end up with virtual machine replicas of each virtual machine on the opposite vSphere server. If you need offsite backup, you can add some usb drives and connect them to your QNAP device to offload the backups to them to take them off site or you can buy another QNAP device for remote replication.

All in all a quick and dirty SMB solution that actually works!

-RP