In a brand new ESX 5.5 U1 environment - all equipment is brand new and running fine, is it possible to manually back up VMs to another server and not use add-on (SRM, third-party) products?
As a possible bottom-line question, if manual backup is chosen (for now), do we miss any vital elements should the primary system fail and we elect to rebuild with media and manually copy the saved VMs back to the rebuilt server?
I am stripping away the normally perceived importance of time to restore, automated events, etc.
From a most basic perspective, is there anything manual preservation/restore would miss?
Thanks.