Side by side BE 2010 and Veeam Windows Agent?

[bucoops]

Hi All,

We are using Veeam for our virtual estate, but we still have one physical server - our primary DC and Exchange server (yes I know... one day...).

It currently uses backup exec 2010 to copy to an RDX cart 5 days a week, which are manually swapped each weekday with no backup over the weekend.

I'd like to install Veeam Agent for Windows to eventually replace BE - but don't want to remove BE until I'm happy that Veeam is running properly. The initial idea being BE does weekday backups and then Veeam does Sat and Sun so there is no VSS overlap. Is this possible?

I'm not a great Veeam expert and I know next to nothing about BE (apart from I hate it...).

Thank you

[Dima P.]

Hi Richard,

The initial idea being BE does weekday backups and then Veeam does Sat and Sun so there is no VSS overlap. Is this possible?

If you follow this approach it might work (but I cant guarantee their party tool behavior). I heard several reports regarding issues with third party VSS components being installed on the agent’s machine. If you see any issues dating the backup – please contact our support team.

[bucoops]

Hi Dima,

thank you - quite nervous on this one as it's the exchange server and we don't have the resources to build a practice server first!

[Dima P.]

Agent should not affect the application. Make sure that you have throttling enabled (Control Panel > Settings) and start a test run at non production hours.

[bucoops]

Agent installed - first test only ran at 30MB/sec. Same speed as BE. Then found the throttle when busy option - unticked this and started getting 320MB/Sec. Much more like it.

Is the level of "busy" configurable as it was essentially at idle but because it runs exchange is never totally idle.

[bucoops]

Just as a follow up - it looks like Veeam agent killed BE. But Veeam agent is working fine so not overly bothered.

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Richard,

I am not aware of a possibility that you can configure the level of busy.

I am interested however to understand what you mean with Veeam agent killed BE?

[bucoops]

Hi Mike,

The BE job failed, and the services wouldn't restart. We've had similar before and a reinstall of BE works but not this time. Not bothered, just means changing over to Veeam for the production backups sooner than planned (we were ready for the eventuality of one or other backup software not working).

That's a shame about not being able to set how busy a server is to trigger the throttling but it's not going to be an issue for us.

[Dima P.]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for sharing the details!

Is the level of "busy" configurable as it was essentially at idle but because it runs exchange is never totally idle.

We leverage the OS resource scheduling – whenever other high priority processes are running (which might be an application residing on this server) VAW should consume less resources from the server.