Server 2008 physical

[Ciso_2021]

Hi guys,

One of our customer is stopping and asked if we can take a backup of his physical 2008 server to a disk for archive purposes.
When I tried to install Veeam agent it’s says “ unsupported OS”.

What are the requirements to backup a physical 2008 server.

Thank you

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello,
Veeam Agent for Windows does support Windows Server 2008, but it needs to be R2 SP1 or above. Take a quick look at the system requirements, please:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agent ... ments.html

Let us know if you have any questions.

Another option could be SMB backup, meaning they do protect the most important files using Veeam.

Do you think they can safely upgrade to R2 and apply SP1?

Let us know

[Ciso_2021]

I don’t know if it possible to upgrade to R2 SP1.
Without backup is scary to update a old box.
But I’ll have to check it Monday again.
I don’t know if windows shadow copy a good backup of the windows in case it’s crashes during the upgrade but I’ll have to check this.

[jorgedlcruz]

Totally understand. As said, depending of what it has inside, I guess not just files. You can do a SMB backup and take the most important.

I do not remember any Veeam Agent for Windows compatible with less than 2k8 R2 SP1.

VMware has released recently a new VMware converter, maybe you can have a P2V on VMware and check if it works.

Good luck!

[Regnor]

Veeam Agent has never supported 2008. And also the new VMware Converter doesn't support it; you would have to use the older release which has been taken offline.

You could use Windows Server backup and then try to restore this backup inside a virtual machine. Afterwards you'll be able to backup the server regularly with VBR.

[hpadm]

Migrating the server to a VM sounds equally scary, the customer might not have a working virtual hosting infrastructure or might not want the cost of hosting this thing, or might want the host to stay on physical hardware. And if on OEM license, it'd have to be self-hosted.

In that case you'll need a different backup solution that still supports windows vista (there is little difference between vista and win7 other than the former being discontinued, so supporting it is a matter of policy and not for any technical reason).

If nothing else, you can resort to the built-in backup mechanism ("wbadmin.exe start backup"), but it can only do incremental backup to a local disk, otherwise it's always full uncompressed backups (I used to 7z them afterwards). The other downside is that the backups include the space taken up by the pagefile and System Volume Information, including all stored restore points, making them larger than needed.