I've seen alot of posts about lan free backup. but my situation seems a little bit more unique.
I have 8 x vsphere 5 servers attached to a fiber SAN.
My tape solution is a Quantum Library (i500) attached via SAS to a physical windows server which is connected to the fiber SAN.
Can this scenario be used to present the ESX volumes to the windows host to provide lan free backups?
If this is possible, can the ESX volumes be read only? what is protection level here so that the windows host doesnt destroy my vmfs volumes? how does the backup exec/windows host read the vmfs volumes?
i believe this doesnt provide vm level restore, but does provide GRT for files and other data.
Lets say i run this job daily because its faster and provides less stress on the vsphere host. If i do a vcenter/vm level (lan) backup weekly or monthly will the data be deduplicated?