Physical vs Virtual Appliance - features available?

[gshaw]

Just trying to get a solution sorted for our backup implementation but not 100% if I'm on the right track or not... any recommendations would be helpful...

New VMWare environment, 3 hosts and eventually around 10-20 VMs on a mixture of NFS and iSCSI SAN storage. We have Veeam Essentials Plus so we've got the item-level recovery feature as part of our license.

Question is whether to go for a physical box or virtual appliance, seems to be pros and cons on both but I'm a bit unsure around what features I lose if I go with a virtual appliance?

- Does the individual item restore feature (U-AIR and IFLR) work with virtualised Veeam server or do I need a physical box to use vPower features?

- Can I replicate a backup set to another device from within Veeam or do I need two jobs for this (e.g. if I wanted to have a small NAS down the other end of the building as a secondary backup target)

- With the feature that allows VMs to run from backup (Instant VM Recovery?) does it basically present the backup file to VMWare and run from the backup storage with VMWare's usual settings or does it need more configuration than that? Again does that feature require a physical server or can it be used with the virtual appliance as well?

[Vitaliy S.]

Question is whether to go for a physical box or virtual appliance, seems to be pros and cons on both but I'm a bit unsure around what features I lose if I go with a virtual appliance?

Veeam B&R has no limitations if you choose to go with Virtual Appliance mode.

- Does the individual item restore feature (U-AIR and IFLR) work with virtualised Veeam server or do I need a physical box to use vPower features?

All vPower functionality that we have is supported for both physical and virtual servers.

- Can I replicate a backup set to another device from within Veeam or do I need two jobs for this (e.g. if I wanted to have a small NAS down the other end of the building as a secondary backup target)

Yes, you would need to configure two jobs, as only one destination target per job is supported, however you may want to use Post-Backup job script to copy backup files on the remote NAS box.

- With the feature that allows VMs to run from backup (Instant VM Recovery?) does it basically present the backup file to VMWare and run from the backup storage with VMWare's usual settings or does it need more configuration than that? Again does that feature require a physical server or can it be used with the virtual appliance as well?

Yes, it works with the usual VMware settings, no additional configuration is required. Please look through our [FAQ] FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS topic for more info about Instant VM Recovery and other vPower functionality.