Veeam Agent Free on Hyper-V Server 2016 Host

[gypsythief]

I currently have a small file / game server running Windows 10 Pro which is backed up by Veeam Agent for Windows Free to a NAS box. As the hardware is under utilised, I am considering installing Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016 on the bare metal, moving the current Win 10 install into a virtual machine, and adding a few extra VMs to take advantage of the spare hardware capacity.

I am looking for a backup solution to run on the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016 host to backup the virtual machines. Veeam Backup and Replication would be the obvious solution, but as this is a home setup with one small server for two users, I cannot afford the £712 box price and would like to stick with the free Veeam offerings (sorry, sales reps!

Whilst Veeam Backup Free Edition is setup for handling VMs there appears to be a couple of problems:
1) The proposed VM would be around 450GB; as I understand it, VBFE seems to do only do full backups each run, not incremental, which as only a few GB's would change each day would be a huge waste of time and resources.
2) It has no inbuilt scheduling. Whilst I understand it can be scheduled via powershell, this is something I'd rather avoid as it adds unnecessary complexity for a simple home setup.

That brings me back to Veeam Agent Free that I currently use. Could I install this on Hyper-V server 2016 and use it to back up the virtual machines? How well does it handle changes to vhdx files? As mentioned above, the main file server one will be around ~450GB, with a few GB's of changes a day. If I use a volume-based block-level backup in Veeam Agent Free, will this only backup the changed bits of the vhdx file each time, or will it consider the whole file as changed and backup 450GB each time?

Thank you for any advice!

[Dima P.]

Hi gypsythief,

Yes you can protect a small Hyper-V server with Veeam Agent for Windows. Keep in mind that it will backup your vm's as files without application consistency provided on a vm guest level.

[gypsythief]

Thank you for the confirmation that this will work. As I am using Veeam Agent to purely backup data, the lack of application consistency doesn't matter for me.

Since posting this thread, I've also had chance to test Veeam Agent's backup of virtual machines: I ran an initial backup overnight, which generated a ~360GB backup file.

This morning I have run two more backups, having added / removed data from the VHD to be backed up; the incremental backup files Veeam Agent produced were around 600-800MB, so everything looks to be working fine.

Of course, one difference between Veeam Agent vs Backup Free is that the Agent cannot recover files from _within_ the VHD, which Backup Free can, so I am still backing up from an Agent with in the virtual machine as well.

[Dima P.]

Glad to hear that your scenario works, thanks for sharing!

[Henrik.Grevelund]

Hi gypsythief

EDIT: Found the answer here : veeam-agent-for-windows-f33/veeam-endpo ... er#p237990

Question:
Did you notice if it uses the Hyper-v VSS writer when running the backup ?

If it does the VHD file should be consistent.