I'm a small operation with 4 hosts in 2 nearby, fiber connected locations (Just inherited support for one of these locations) on a college campus. In the past I've had a retired machine with 1-2 TB in each location acting as my VCB/Backup Proxy. This was cheap disk space that would have otherwise gone unused. These physical machines would copy snapshots to their local disks and keep 3 revisions as a nearline backup. They would also run Tivoli Storage Manager client to send offsite backups to tape each night where I would keep 3 more revisions in case the feces really hit the fan.
This was simple but worked really well. I could easily use VMware Converter Standalone at any time to push any of these backed up VM images to my vCenter or directly to a particular host if I needed to restore the vCenter server itself. Simple, cheap, and almost foolproof accept for the occasional failure of VCB to cleanup it's snapshots causing the next night's backup to fail.
I've been messing with VDR for a few days now since upgrading to vCenter/ESXi 5 and although it has some nice features I'm failing to see how to make this work well for me. If I had a complete loss of the virtual data center that is running my vCenter server it looks like it complicates things quite a bit. Also, short of buying more disk hardware to accommodate VDR I'm stuck with using CIFS to store the backups on the machines that were previously operating as the VCB proxies. CIFS seems to be a bit buggy on the VDR appliance and is obviously slow.
I like the idea of deduplicated data but I think I'd rather be able to just have encapsulated backups of my VMs that would be easier to manage when pushed off to tape on another system then potentially restored back later.
BTW VCB still appears to be working OK even after the upgrade. I'm assuming this is because I haven't upgraded the file system on my storage yet.
What's the best, currently supported way to just grab vmdk's and vmx's from vCenter vs. the convoluted mess of "slab" and "dat" files from VDR? Is there a way to do this in VDR that I'm just missing?