How to Upgrade the Guest OS and Preserve Retention

[BrianS_WincVA]

Hello,
We have a lot of Server 2016 VMs and I’m looking for the best way to go about migrating them to Server 2022. Historically what I’ve done is build a brand new VM, install OS, set the same hostname and IP as the old VM, copy data and applications-this was back when we used a different backup solution. Now that we’re on Veeam, I’ve done some testing and found when I try my usual process, Veeam can tell the new VM is different. The result is the new VM gets backed up with its retention period being managed correctly while the old VM’s restore points remain untouched. I understand it is the new VM having a different UID, so I tested the only idea I’ve thought of so far as follows: I created a new VM and specified Server 2022 as OS just to see what VMware generates for RAM, disk controller types, NIC types, boot options, etc. just so I could reference and I then adjusted the settings of a 2016 VM to match then removed and re-added the OS disk. I could then do my typical process and next time the backup job ran, it successfully did an incremental and retention and GFS worked fine.
I’d just like to get confirmation if this is the best way or if there is some feature in Veeam I could use to manage restore points if the job no longer can see a relationship between the old and new VM backups.

[Mildur]

Hello Brian

or if there is some feature in Veeam I could use to manage restore points if the job no longer can see a relationship between the old and new VM backups.

The feature is called background retention and will clean up retired restore points.

I understand it is the new VM having a different UID, so I tested the only idea I’ve thought of so far as follows: I created a new VM and specified Server 2022 as OS just to see what VMware generates for RAM, disk controller types, NIC types, boot options, etc. just so I could reference and I then adjusted the settings of a 2016 VM to match then removed and re-added the OS disk. I could then do my typical process and next time the backup job ran, it successfully did an incremental and retention and GFS worked fine.

That could work as well. But too much work for multiple servers.

I recommend to keep it simple.
Create new VMs and add them to the backup job. The Backup Job retention and Background Retention job will take care of the old restore points.

Best,
Fabian

[BrianS_WincVA]

Thank you. This sounds like exactly what I need. The article you linked makes it seem like this is already enabled? Maybe I need to do another test and wait longer... past the GFS period and see what happens to the old backups.