Cross-Post Hyper-V and Backup recommendations

DustinB3403

Hi folks,

Question on safe practices with backing up.

I have a small business that I conduct daily backups for. I have one server that runs Hyper-V with various images, including, DC, mail, and files, along with physical boxes on the domain.

Each physical box is being backed up daily (a mix of full and incremental...based on the day of the week) and the server is backed up fully daily; including the Hyper-V Vms.

My question is, should I also run backup agents (I use Veeam), on the Hyper-V environments and back them up as if they were physical boxes? Or is the daily backup fine.

On the server, I use Windows Server Backup for full metal backup.

Thanks

coliver

It depends? What's your RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective). We, as a rule, can't really know those as the business itself determines how long your infrastructure can be down and how much data can be missing.

That being said. I would kind of go with Veeam for backups with agents in this instance, I haven't had the best of luck with Windows Server Backup.

scottalanmiller

@dustinb3403 said in Cross-Post Hyper-V and Backup recommendations:

My question is, should I also run backup agents (I use Veeam), on the Hyper-V environments and back them up as if they were physical boxes? Or is the daily backup fine.

General practice is to not back up the host itself. You should have a process to rebuild the host and, in theory, this should be incredibly fast and simple. Since restoring bare metal is always a pain because you have to get the restore going without an agent, rebuilding a nearly stateless host is generally faster and simpler and doesn't require storage and management.