The Deutsches Museum is one of the most important museums of science and technology in the world.

Its collection consists of more than 100,000 objects from the fields of science and technology. Highlights include the first mass produced motorized aircraft built by the Wright brothers, the U1 submarine, the first program-controlled computer, Konrad Zuse’s Z3, Diesel’s original engine and the first motorcar by Carl Benz.

Since most exhibitions, displays and experiments are built in-house, there are a wide range of professions among the 600 employees. The Deutsches Museum has four locations: the museums island in Munich, the traffic museum in Munich, the museum of flight in Schleißheim, and a branch in Bonn.

Virtual machines offer most of the internal services from mail, web and print servers, administration of all the museums objects through project planning and financial data. Many services and databases are very specific and only needed for a single department or task.

An easy-to-use solution was needed to back up the VMware ESXi environment. Currently, there are five ESXi hosts running 68 VMs, 24 of which are critical and require a more frequent backup.

Archiware Pure was chosen for the clean and simple user interface and easy installation. Simple administration was crucial, and the fact that all of Pure’s backups can be checked within one user interface saves time and effort.

Restore of both single files and complete VMs was an important requirement. 

The engineer in charge, Thomas Mondt, is happy with the new setup:

“Running and maintaining so many different services is a challenge. Some of them are exotic and needed for very specific tasks. A solid backup provides us with the security we need. Archiware Pure makes it extremely easy for us to achieve this with a minimum amount of time invested. We especially like the central interface that shows all VMs being backed up as well as their status, last run and storage needs. This saves us a lot of time”