Best practices for physical server file copy?

[BCosse-PLI]

Afternoon,

New Veeam customer "not sure how long" but currently a Veeam customer with some questions for best practice since the web has provided a number of answers that are mixed. We have a mixed environment across 4 sites and I am the one who convinced my company to purchase Veeam as a backup solution for one of those sites at this time with potentially having Veeam across the Enterprise. We "my coworker and I" envisioned having Veeam support the entire enterprise but i learned something about Veeam after the purchase which may cause roadblocks unless we can figure out a workaround. This was never properly explained prior but I've made it a point to work through this as best i can

Environment (Site A) - is in somewhat of a sensitive/critical state from the support side. The site had very old physical servers running operations and no real backup solution in place due to network and domain level trusts not being established "this is currently in the works to fix" so because if this we needed a single site backup solution with offsite replication. The new environment for Site A is hosted on a highly spec'd HP server with onboard storage is hosted locally at the site with vSphere 5.5 and I have 12 VM's built to support operations. This site is a production facility that is required to keep FDA compliance and if anyone who is in this field knows some of your production equipment supplied by other vendors has to be on a physical box like automation PC's which allows the engineers access.

Backup solution for Site A - This site has an onsite backup server with local storage HP DL380P, Dual Xeon Processors, 64GB Ram, 25TB of direct attached storage. The new VM's are backed up with Veeam to the assigned storage provisions on the local backup server. The backup jobs are done in a matter of minutes which is very impressive.

For the time being i would like to know of a way to file copy the physical system data using Veeam file copy. I tried everything from using service accounts, local admin accounts, DA accounts and EA accounts. All of which failed and later identified as a Veeam problem / limitation. Its hard for me to swallow the fact that Veeam does not backup physical computers or servers. I've P2V'd a number of servers already which seem to work fine in the new environment but i have some servers i cannot P2V due to issues with VMware that i am working to resolve and some I cannot P2V due to them being in production and the hardware installed cannot be virtual. Ideally it would be GREAT if they would just give us what we need not what they think we want. I read tons of threads online with other sites and in this forum of the bottleneck with Veeam and physical systems and you know all of this was found after the purchase..lol

Please help direct me though this physical dependency nightmare.

Thanks

[Gostev]

failed and later identified as a Veeam problem / limitation

Can you please elaborate on that? While we don't do physical, the File Copy functionality should work fine. However, it is important to understand that File Copy functionality is literally a file copy, it is not built to be a backup solution in the first place... so I am not sure it worth to pursue this road.

What some people with the same requirements as you have do, is script copy the required files from physical servers to a file server VM, and backup that VM with Veeam. Considering that there is usually only a handful of servers that "really really" cannot be virtualized, this works well.

Hope this helps.

[BCosse-PLI]

Morning Gostev,

This statement was made in reference to the limits of selecting the root of C on a machine as it fails due to it being unable to copy certain files like sys vol. The file copy does work if you are looking to copy a certain folder but its exactly as you put it "File Copy functionality is literally a file copy". It would be great if Veeam can somehow offer addons to include physical backups but due to this issue i will need to do some homework to see if we should continue with Veeam and use backup exec for the physical systems or just stick with Backup Exec and let HP SV replicate the data offsite. Veeam ideally would be the best but in the production/manufacturing world we have physical systems critical to operations that will need to be backed up.

Thanks for your help and understanding

[Gostev]

Hi, would it help you if File Copy was enhanced to be able to process all files, including locked and system files? And perhaps had basic file-level incremental backup built into to it (if the file changes, it is copied in its entirety)? Or are you looking for something more complex than this? Thanks.

[RMullis]

Hi Anton,

Your mentioned enhancements would help my company tremendously.

Rick

[veremin]

Hi, Rick,

Have you tried to take a look at VB&R Cloud Edition which supports VSS and allows you to copy only changed files; might do the trick for you?

Thanks.