Hyper-V VM as proxy

[joshima]

Hey Guys,

why I cant add a hyper v vm which runs on a hyper v node not as a off host backup proxy?

[Andreas Neufert]

Off-Host proxies must be outside of the cluster in order to have the mounts not interfering with regular hyper-v datastore mounts.

In general there is no advantage in using off-host backup proxies on the hosts directly as the regular on-host backup processing would be less error prone and faster in that specific situation. Remember the Hyper-V VM checkpoint "snapshots" do not have the same issue as the VMware VM redolog snapshots, so you can create them and keep them for a while without issues or issues when you delete them. The Off-Host processing has mainly the advantage, that the dataflow goes directly from the storage to the proxy. Which would be the same in your case with on-host proxies.

[joshima]

Ah I understand. Do you have maybe a documentation for that? I several questions. But for my understanding an offhost proxy is needed for my company infrastructure. Many VM's which are productive. Maybe you can already answer following question. Are the concurrent tasks for hyper v Offhost Proxy the same as for vmware offhost proxy. Which means that the concurent tasks are the disks to process, am I right here?

[joshima]

Off-Host proxies must be outside of the cluster in order to have the mounts not interfering with regular hyper-v datastore mounts.

In general there is no advantage in using off-host backup proxies on the hosts directly as the regular on-host backup processing would be less error prone and faster in that specific situation. Remember the Hyper-V VM checkpoint "snapshots" do not have the same issue as the VMware VM redolog snapshots, so you can create them and keep them for a while without issues or issues when you delete them. The Off-Host processing has mainly the advantage, that the dataflow goes directly from the storage to the proxy. Which would be the same in your case with on-host proxies.

Hey,

Ive read now some documentations. As far as I know now is that the off host proxy has to be a physical server which is not part of the hyper v cluster. But I cant find anywhere something to this topic. Is it possible to use this off host proxy for hyper v when the storage which is used is S2D. I think it is not possible to create transportable shadow copys with S2D storage, as far as I understand the usage of an off host proxy is only possible, when I use SAN am I right here?

[david.domask]

Hi joshima,

Off-Host backup proxies, a Hardware VSS Provider from the respective storage vendor is required on both the off-host proxy and the hosts in the production cluster. I don't think there's a way to do this with S2D storage as it's a logical layer.

And I would repeat Andreas' statement that off-host proxies are no longer recommended for many reasons, most notably that the performance between on-host and off-host are comparable, while on-host has significantly less configuration and potential issues.

I understand your concern is workload on the production hosts -- by default, Veeam takes steps to ensure that we're not overloading the hosts by limiting concurrent snapshots, for example, and we have many many many clients using on-host backup without incident for their production machines.

In the worst case scenario where a machine is impacted by the VM backup process, consider Veeam Agent for Windows/Linux for these machines. The restore narrative is very similar to VM backup/restore, the only major difference being that instead of Entire VM restore, you will use Instant Recovery for recovering the entire machine in a disaster recovery event.

Ultimately, stick with on-host proxies and if image level backup does impact the production VMs, consider using Veeam Agents to protect those machines.

[joshima]

many thanks for your help