Pre Purchase Question

Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5 Windows Small Business Server Edition enables you to restore complete Windows systems in minutes, even to dissimilar hardware or virtual environments, with new functionality to automate physical to virtual conversions for immediate system recovery. Additional capabilities include flexible offsite protection; Exchange, SharePoint and file/folder recovery; and support for the latest virtual environments and Microsoft 2008 operating systems.

for more information refer to below mentioned link...
http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/fact_sheets/b-datasheet_backup_exec_system_recovery_sbs_08-2008_12001751-2.en-us.pdf

hope this resolves your query

BESR is not capable of using tape as a backup medium.  Most hard drive based media is capable of being used as a backup medium, but research well before buying.  SANs seem to be troublesome and there is no ISCSI initiator in the recovery environment.  I use both ISCSI and SCSI drive enclosures in my environment, but their drives are mapped on anther server for access by the imaging process and recovery environment.

I consider BESR and BEWS complimentary products.  BESR still has a long way to go when it comes to granular recovery, especially with Exchange objects.  If you use public folders, the Granular Recovery Option for BESR will not recover them.  Extracting ordinary files and folders from the images works well.  BESR will backup SQL databases, but no granular recovery of SQL objects is available.

I would go along with Marco's assesment.

I consider Backup Exec for Windows servers to be a Backup Product that is used in conjunction with Backup Exec System Recovery (DR product) for complete system protection.

Gilly

Could someone give a high-level description of how the 2 products would work together...especially given that BESR does not support tape?

Here is how we use the separate products together:

Once per week we capture a disaster recovery image of all our servers with BESR.  The images are stored on an external drive enclosure(RAID enabled) and also copied to external USB drives for offsite storage.  Daily backups are also taken with Backup Exec for Windows.  We run a few different backup jobs with BEWS.  Most jobs store to .BKF  files on an external drive enclosure(also RAID enabled) while other jobs write to tape.  Most of the file/folder, Mailbox item recovery and SQL item recovery is done within BEWS since their specific agents make granular recovery much easier. 

In the event that a server dies and needs disaster recovery, the lab tested an verified plan is:

• Boot the replacement server, or same server with new drives with the BESR SRD
• Restore the most recent disaster recovery image to the server
• Use BEWS to restore the files/folders/databases to the most recently backedup versions.  Since most of our backups are on .BKF files, the process goes quickly.

The kick in the pants is that you buy a disaster recovery solution and hope you never have to use it.  However, Mr Murphy will eventuall come by for an unannounced  visit.  Mr Murphy paid us a visit one time while I was 50 miles away.  Being an ungracious guest, he took down the array that holds our Exchange databases.  I was able to remote connect into the server and rebuild the array and restore the data.  The RAID array containing the OS was still operational, so I didn't need the SRD.  However, I could have done this as a Lights Out restore if needed.