Hypervisor vs Agent Backups

[vertices]

We have some troubles with onboarding customers that have poor environments. We need to get backups going right away, and simply can't correct all the various issues. This seems to really be an issue with inherited Hyper-V deployments that are in various states of neglect and poor design. VMware tends to be more reliable and functional when we acquire those clients.

Anyways, I'm thinking we should just deploy VBR and deploy Veeam agents to VMs in these environments. When the hypervisor is having trouble using CBT/RCT, or it's slow to make snapshots, and just generally not behaving properly, that really makes managing VBR jobs tough. We also end up having to sling VMs around to different hosts soon, and then we need new fulls. It's been a mess deploying VBR to these poor environments.

My thought was if we used agents in the VMs instead for poor deployments such as these, we could avoid some of these problems initially, so the other teams can form plans, get proposals out, and get proper infrastructure out there. It would seem the agent could ignore some of these hypervisor issues, and just roll backups to the VBR same as you would with any legacy backup solution that is running backups from inside the guest.

I am sure there is a performance impact backing up in this manner compared to a hypervisor level backup, but I am wondering how much an impact it would have. I need to simplfy these Veeam deployments for the onboarding teams, when we don't have time to immediately jump in and start making infrastrucutre changes. Are Veeam agent backups performant enough to operate in this manner? Or should I expect a decent performance and reliability hit? I don't like having to do this, but so far these deployments have been a mess and I need to improve this process given our restrictions. Thanks!

[Mildur]

Hello Rob

Veeam Agent will use the same hardware resources given to your virtual machine.
It may be possible that a application on a production VM will have to fight for RAM and CPU resources while the agent is performing a a backup session. But I don't have any numbers to compare the performance between an agent and VM backup.
I think for most systems it will be ok to use the agent.

Please note, a restore of the entire VM will take longer when you use the recovery media to restore the VM.
For VM backups, you can leverage features such as Quick Rollback or Instant Recovery. Instant Recovery is also available for Agent backups to Hyper-V, but it will create a VM with a new ID. New backup chains will be created for this VM.

Best,
Fabian