Greetings all, I am new to my organisation and would like to get vRealize Orchestrator Up and running. I have some experience with and working knowledge of VMware/vCenter/vSphere/Fusion and Virtual machines as a concept, I just want to do this correctly.
Main Goal: Keep good backups of our VM's
Given: We have three ESX servers (3 Datastores etc.) and Are running vCenter Version 5. We have about 9 Virtual Servers in production (Backup DC\DNS\DHCP, SQL servers, a wiki, Apache\web host, Terminal Services services etc.). None of them are too complex or large but we want to keep a good and quickly available backup of each. In one of my previous lives we used to keep backups by doing a fresh snapshot everyday, and keeping 3 snapshots per machine. I attempted to set that up here but it appears the ability to have it automatically take a snapshot and then delete any older than "x" days is gone? It's been about three years since I've used vShpere. (My most immediate previous life we didn't use VMWare in any fashion). So a-hunting I went and discovered that VMware doesn't recommend using snapshots as a backup method, they recommend using vRealize Orchestrator instead. I was told by (Someone at VMWare) that this available for free.
What i need: Some basics about how this is used. So far it appears it can be done in two ways, as an add-on to vCenter (Would this be like having a new features pane show up in vSphere or something?) or, as some kind of standalone server. (Is this server also a VM, what OS is it?).
Sorry If i am asking questions that are too basic, but i thought it might be an easy answer from someone with experience. Thank you in advance.
-Jim