Hyper-V Do I need to start backups from scratch when moving to Failover Cluster?

[WMUDLeV]

I'm beginning the move from VMWare to Hyper-V. In order to get the hardware evacuated while keeping everything up, I need to stage everything. I'm going to start moving some non essential VMs for testing over to an empty server I have, that will free up resources on one of the two "Cluster" servers which will become Hyper-V host 2. I will then migrate the remaining machines from the other "cluster" server over to HV2 leaving me with a third empty machine to become HV3. Once that is done I'm free to reformat our SAN for Failover Cluster shared volumes.

My question is in the interim while I'm moving these VMs to standalone servers, I will be backing them up with Veeam. Once everything settles, all VMs will be in a Failover Cluster with shared storage. Will I have to start from fresh backups all over again, or will Veeam recognize that these VMs are the same VMs that were being backed up already?

Followup Question, 1 of the 3 servers will be at another location as a standalone Hyper-V server, not part of the Failover Cluster. I would like to replicate VMs from the failover cluster over to this server as disaster recovery. Is that supported?

TIA

[david.domask]

Hi WMUDLeV,

>Will I have to start from fresh backups all over again, or will Veeam recognize that these VMs are the same VMs that were being backed up already?

You'll need to start fresh -- re-add the VMs to jobs from the cluster instead of the standalone hosts or create new jobs sourced from the cluster.

> Followup Question, 1 of the 3 servers will be at another location as a standalone Hyper-V server, not part of the Failover Cluster. I would like to replicate VMs from the failover cluster over to this server as disaster recovery. Is that supported?

Yep, you can do this.

[nmdange]

The only way not to have to start over would be to use SCVMM to manage your Hyper-V environment and add VMs to your Veeam jobs via SCVMM.

[antrill]

Hi,
since we just migrated from VMware to Hyper-V, doing one node at a time, I had a similar challenge. I prepared an AD domain for the Hyper-V environment and then created a one-node cluster. Migration was done mostly with Veeam's incredibly good "Instant Recovery to Hyper-V" feature. After migrating some machines to this first node, I reinstalled the next one with Windows / Hyper-V role and added it to the cluster. So the new Veeam Job did not need to be changed again.
Regarding the SAN - we had some free space on it and just added new LUNs that were only accessible to the Hyper-V initiators. So I could keep the VMware and MS worlds separated but migrate within the same storage device. Moved the biggest VMs first so I had an empty LUN where the VMware version of those VMs had been, deleted that, on to the next LUN...