My Veeam Backup Server is a VM in Hyper-V

[Eric1969]

Hello everyone,

This is the situation.
We have a Bera Metal Windows Hyper-V server with 4 Virtual servers on it. One of hem is our Veeam Backup server which is backing up the other vm's.

Perhaps it was not very useful to also install the BK server as a virtual server? What do you think?

What are the steps in a disaster recovery scenario?

I am new with Hyper-V. We had used VmWare for the last 20 years.

Thanks in advance

Kind regards

Eric.

[david.domask]

Hi Eric,

Check our System Requirements page here for our guidance:

We do not recommend you to install Veeam Backup & Replication and its components on mission-critical machines in the production environment such as Microsoft Hyper-V Server, Domain Controller, Microsoft Exchange Server, Small Business Server/ Windows Server Essentials and so on. If possible, install Veeam Backup & Replication and its components on dedicated machines. Backup infrastructure component roles can be co-installed.

The backup server operations may impact performance (as well as bring other challenges) if installed directly to the Hyper V parent partition (the Hyper V host itself), and Microsoft advises against installing anything beyond AV into the parent partition as well. And it makes sense since a lot of applications may require reboots or have other issues that cause challenges with the Hyper V host's ability to host.

Keeping it in a VM is fine, or a machine that meets the System Requirements outside of the HyperV environment.

As for recovery if the HyperV host becomes inoperable:

1. Ensure you have the backups and the Configuration Backup stored in a repository outside of the HyperV host
2. Recover the HyperV host and prepare a VM for Veeam Backup and Replication (VBR)
3. Restore the Configuration Backup to the VBR server
4. Proceed with other restores

That is a very quick workflow for your recovery here, though it's not set in stone; the main point is to have the Configuration Backup stored elsewhere for fast recovery, so how you get that Configuration Backup applied is flexible so long as you have it.