Hyper-V proxy vs VMware proxy

[andriktr]

Can someone explain why in Hyper-V virtualization environment for off-host proxy we need to have hardware proxy server and HW VSS provider. What is the difference here comparing with vmware where we can use simple VM as proxy server? Do we can expect that something will change here with new Windows server 2016 and Veeam 9.5 or later versions.
Thank you.

[PTide]

Hi,

You can assign the off-host proxy role to a VM, however it's not recommended. Please check this article for details.

Thanks

[andriktr]

Hi,
Thanks for your reply.
In this case I think this will be unsupported solution from Veeam side. Also nesting is recommended only for testing purposes. In all cases we still will need hardware vss provider which by my opinion sometimes tricky configurable or not configurable at all, with some kind of data stores. In vmware setup everything is much easier.

[nmdange]

If you use scale-out file servers to present your storage to Hyper-V over SMBv3 instead of FC/iSCSI, you can do off-host proxy without a hardware VSS provider. That requires separate physical servers to be used for storage, so it only makes sense for larger environments. I have 4 separate Hyper-V clusters with SOFS for storage, and I have a physical Windows server with lots of local disks that acts as both my backup repository and off-host proxy. Veeam works really well in this config, but if you are small with only 2-4 Hyper-V hosts it's definitely overkill.

Windows Server 2016 is moving away from VSS for host-based backups and Microsoft is providing built-in Change Tracking so I would expect the options to improve in the future. WS 2016 is also providing official support for nested virtualization, so it may be supported to use a VM as off-host proxy in the future.

[nefes]

There is not much sense in having off-host as VM, from my point of view.
The most important role of off-host is moving load away from production host, so no point in having that VM on production host.
On the other side, if you have some spare host to run off-host VM on it, why don't you use that host itself as off-host?

[andriktr]

For my case it's not so important which type of proxy server to use VM or HW, but more important is that for off-host proxy setup we need hardware vss provider and we can't do it with some of our storages.
My expectation here is to have something like in vmware where we do not need HW VSS providers.
One more time thanks for your replys.

[Vitaliy S.]

In this case I think this will be unsupported solution from Veeam side. Also nesting is recommended only for testing purposes. In all cases we still will need hardware vss provider which by my opinion sometimes tricky configurable or not configurable at all, with some kind of data stores. In vmware setup everything is much easier.

It will be supported, but as Nikita said there is little sense in configuring off-host proxy in the VM. In this case on-host proxy can do a better job.

For my case it's not so important which type of proxy server to use VM or HW, but more important is that for off-host proxy setup we need hardware vss provider and we can't do it with some of our storages.
My expectation here is to have something like in vmware where we do not need HW VSS providers.

Hmm... but hardware VSS providers is always preferred even for on-host proxy servers. Out of curiosity, what is the storage you use that has difficulties in setting up hardware VSS provider.

[andriktr]

For example IBM DS3500 or DS3400

[Vitaliy S.]

Yeah, quick google search returned that there are some issues with hardware VSS at least for 3300 series. Thanks.