Networker in a VMware Virtulized Environment

Hi Mark,

From my point of view, and from a functional point of view, there should be not much difference in NetWorker server being virtual or physical machine.

The advantages of being virtual is the storage, and you can play around with it more than with a physical machine, where you can only add more HD's. Also, if you have redundancy at VMWare level, will be easier to have a DR for a NetWorker server, and this also allows you to move the location of the NW server in case it's required.

The disadvantage would be the performance of the ESX server, let's say that if the ESX server has not a good performance because of the amount os VM's and HW resources allocated, then NetWorker performance can be also affected by this.

Having a physical machine maybe would be easier to configure in terms of SAN and backup devices, but should not be much difference in this point either, if the SAN, LUN's and network is correctly set up.

If you are asking about HW requirements, I would suggest to take a look at the NetWorker documentation, as depending on the number of clients etc, the requirements slightly change.

Thank you.

Carlos.