It really worked!

I just wanted to post a message about this product. A lot of the posts on this site are for problems, but I tried somthing today that just amazed me...

I have 2 ESX 3.5 u4 hosts on shared storage and my main site. Both run Acronis virtual appliances that backup the VM's on the hosts. At my D/R site I have an ESX 4 u1 and an ESXi 3.5 host using dedicated storage on each host.

Today I tried an experiment.
- I exported a TIB file of a VM on the 3.5 u4 host to a file share on a running server (that just happened to be on the ESXi host).
- I built a test VM on the ESXi host and told it to bootto the Acronis boot media ISO that was on the dedicated storage of the ESXi host
- When the VM booted in to Acronis I pointed it to the file share where the exported TIB was and started the recover operation I shut donw the VM.
- Then I edited the Test VM config to not connect the network
- And then booted the test VM - Up came my backed up server
- All the data was there and from what I see it should work just fine

So I am pretty impressed at what I could do to recover a backup like this. I'm sure this will not work in all senerios but in this test I was very happy.

The only isue is Acronis may say I'm not licensed to do this. But my 'justification ' is this is only for a disaster recovery test so maybe they won't call the cops on me!

Larry