VBR WIN to Veeam Appliance linux - migration scenario

[BostjanUNIJA]

Hi.
Customer has:
Hyperv (STD 2019)
A few Windows VM's and a few linux VM's.
VBR - version 13.x on Windows

The idea is to migrate them to Veeam Linux Software appliance.
Veeam on linux is ready.
New backup repositories also.
But on linux appliance we haven't introduced yet a hyperv to it.
Reasons?
I've read that at the same time having VBR on WINDOWS and Veeam on linux connected to the same Hypervisor is not the best practise.
The idea from my side was. Turn off backup job on Windows, create a new one on Linux, and do the same for all the other jobs.
So at the time of the migration from Veeam Windows to Linux both Veeam servers should have connection to the same Hypervisor, so you can do a side by side migration.

What your thoughts on that?
Is there any other better approach of migrating Veeam from Windows environment to Linux?

[Mildur]

Hi Bostjan

We deploy on-host proxies components on HyperV during the configuration in Veeam. Multiple Backup Server can theoretically work with the same HyperV server, if the backup server build is the exact same between all backup server. But it’s not recommended or supported.
While that may have worked with Windows backup server, I wouldn‘t try it with a Windows/Linux backup server mix. It‘s the same product, but this server are not exactly 100% the same. For example, you can‘t use a single backup console to manage both backup server.

You say, there are only „a few“ VMs. I recommend todo a single migration of all VMs to the appliance.
Reconnect your repositories, import backups, create new backup jobs and map the imported backups.

Best,
Fabian

[BostjanUNIJA]

Fabian thank you for your reply.
I'm not sure if I will be able to do anything with current VBR repository and backups (we will just keep that VBR and its repository for some period of time as archive), because repository is introduced to Windows VBR over ISCI to LUN on NAS and then formatted in REFS format.

Linux Veeam appliance will have the same type of repository but offcourse file system will be formatted in different XFS format (besides Veeam appliance we have installed 1 more Linux server with Ubuntu server distro, represented a new ISCI lun target to that server, and added this Linux Ubuntu server to Veeam appliance as managed server and as a backup repository).

I know that immutable repository would be better, but we can not represent it as we have only NAS synology as backup repository, and I dont wish to create custom immutable repositorities on Ubuntu distro.

Technically we could also use virtualization on NAS Synology and Veeam infrastructure appliance ISO to create immutable backup repository (create Veeam VM directly on NAS, which actually worked in my lab environment, but I dont feel comfortable having NAS as a hypervisor, although it works).

Instead of having immutable repository, since this is a very small customer, we are using the logic of multiple rotated external usb drives, where we rotate multiple of this external drives on some period od time, and physically storing then on different location (in safe deposit) so with that logic we achieve air gapped repositorities for worst case scenarios.