What Are You Doing Right Now
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My favourite backup solution is SCDPM (for the Hyper-V world), but it's so expensive, making most other paid options way better.
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@wirestyle22 I always do exports to external drives as another disaster recovery copy and then take to another location.
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@brandon220 I've done one P2V migration
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@tim_g said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
My favourite backup solution is SCDPM (for the Hyper-V world), but it's so expensive, making most other paid options way better.
And it's anything but reliable. Ok, that's not exactly true, but it's definitely nothing you want to run as a small shop. I still remember tons of cryptic errors in 2012 and 2012r2
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
And it's anything but reliable.
SCDPM 2016 is extremely reliable, more so than anything I've ever used... ever, as far as paid backup solutions go. But yeah, I won't use it in typical SMB because there are other options that are cheaper that are good too.
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But it's great if you have a ton of Hyper-V hosts, ton of data, and need lots of different backup configurations and schedules along with the whole tape ordeal.
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@tim_g
How long did it take you to setup SCDPM? That's a lot of work to install a backup system.
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@black3dynamite said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@tim_g
How long did it take you to setup SCDPM? That's a lot of work to install a backup system.
Not long.
It's just installing:
- Set up server hardware and DAS
- Install Windows Server 2016 Standard CORE + Hyper-V Role
** You need features Hyper-V Server does not offer for this, so rare use-case exception here ** - Set up MS SQL (VM1) (SCDPM includes license for this)
- Set up SCDPM (VM2)
Pre-planning it all makes it go fast.... above was just quick from distant memory, but it's the basics at a high level.
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@black3dynamite said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@tim_g
How long did it take you to setup SCDPM? That's a lot of work to install a backup system.
you begin by installing a full blown SQL Server as a backend database. + (At least in in 2012R2) you need to take care of a backup of DPM itself for disaster recovery. As far as I remember, you'll need a working domain to restore data. But it's years ago, things my have changed.
It's a good product, don't get me wrong. But it's major league.
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@black3dynamite said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@tim_g
How long did it take you to setup SCDPM? That's a lot of work to install a backup system.
you begin by installing a full blown SQL Server as a backend database. + (At least in in 2012R2) you need to take care of a backup of DPM itself for disaster recovery. As far as I remember, you'll need a working domain to restore data. But it's years ago, things my have changed.
It's a good product, don't get me wrong. But it's major league.
Yeah it's better now. Really, you'd use your existing MS SQL server, and replicate it to your SCDPM server host. This way, you always have a restorable replica so you can always restore.... as well as replicate your SCDPM VM (not the storage repository)
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Then you could replicate your DAS to another location/building/site, as well as archive it to tape periodically.
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Looks like they improved a few things. But I'll go for Veeam this time, even with ultra-cheap MS EDU licensing.
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Looks like they improved a few things. But I'll go for Veeam this time, even with ultra-cheap MS EDU licensing.
In one case, Veeam cost twice as much as SCDPM. So it's a toss up. Unitrends came in at the lowest.
Veeam can be super expensive. But people do it often without weighing other options first.
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Looks like they improved a few things.
A lot actually, like 10-fold. I posted some stuff on this like a year ago, but it's even better than that now.
Backups of SQL servers every 15 minutes happen like instantly... hourly backups happen instantly. Daily backups of huge file servers happen very quick. Archive stuff is great. Splitting where backups go, etc... some parts back up to SSD, some to internal storage, some to DAS... it's great.
The change tracking on Hyper-V 2016 is awesome now, and SCDPM takes full advantage of it... so you don't have to rely on a 3rd party backup software using their own buggy drivers to do it.
Tape tracking/management is super easy.
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@tim_g said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Looks like they improved a few things. But I'll go for Veeam this time, even with ultra-cheap MS EDU licensing.
In one case, Veeam cost twice as much as SCDPM. So it's a toss up. Unitrends came in at the lowest.
Veeam can be super expensive. But people do it often without weighing other options first.
That surely depends on your environment. I agree, costs can explode quickly once you leave the "get 3 hosts backed up for cheap"-field. On the other hand - if you are this large, you probably have other things to worry about than 1,5k USD/socket for backup.
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
That surely depends on your environment.
Yeah this is the number one factor here... i'm not telling anyone to use SCDPM... I'm just saying it's my favorite to use with Hyper-V... disregarding costs and such.
I'll probably never use SCDPM again... but it was awesome.
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@tim_g said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Tape tracking/management is super easy.
That's something I never understood in 2012r2 - tape guessing was actually a game we played at my last gig.
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@tim_g said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Looks like they improved a few things.
Tape tracking/management is super easy.That's something I never understood in 2012r2 - tape guessing was actually a game we played at my last gig.
Yeah having to deal with that manually just straight up sucks.
In 2016, you label it all, it tracks what is where, which you to put in, when, etc... super easy and thoughtless once it's set up and labeled.
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@tim_g said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@tim_g said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Looks like they improved a few things.
Tape tracking/management is super easy.That's something I never understood in 2012r2 - tape guessing was actually a game we played at my last gig.
Yeah having to deal with that manually just straight up sucks.
In 2016, you label it all, it tracks what is where, which you to put in, when, etc... super easy and thoughtless once it's set up and labeled.
That sounds like... they wrote a whole new software
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@tim_g said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@tim_g said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Looks like they improved a few things.
Tape tracking/management is super easy.That's something I never understood in 2012r2 - tape guessing was actually a game we played at my last gig.
Yeah having to deal with that manually just straight up sucks.
In 2016, you label it all, it tracks what is where, which you to put in, when, etc... super easy and thoughtless once it's set up and labeled.
That sounds like... they wrote a whole new software
More like still writing... they still aren't finished with it. It was just recently they started supporting VMWare in it. 2012 R2 had it, but it took this damn long to have it in 2016.
