What is good practice for SBS successors?

[StefanoFereri]

Hi professionals,

Veeam states in it's technical documents that it's ok to install B&R within VM (instead on host) in a small Hyper-V environment: Hyper-V-Core with one VM as Domain Controller and second VM as Exchange Server. Since it gives me headache to install additional software onto my DC (which is VM No. 1, the other one is the Exchange server) there are two questions to me:

1. Is it a good practice to install Veeam into it's own VM (may be Windows 7 / 8 ) and still have granular file and email restore?
2. I plan to do d2d2t backup onto local disks and local tape, using Forward Incremental Backup with Syntethic Full. Is that possible with B&R running from within VM?

Thanks for any help and regards,
Stefano

[foggy]

1. Is it a good practice to install Veeam into it's own VM (may be Windows 7 / 8 ) and still have granular file and email restore?

Yes, Veeam B&R can be installed on a VM.

2. I plan to do d2d2t backup onto local disks and local tape, using Forward Incremental Backup with Syntethic Full. Is that possible with B&R running from within VM?

Yes, you can assign the role of a tape proxy to the server the library is connected to.

[StefanoFereri]

Thanks, Alexander. You stated, that B&R can be installed on it's own Windows-8-Guest-VM. For being sure: Is it capable then to backup and (granular) restore files from both the other VMs (VM1, which is DC and file Server and VM2, which is Exchange Server)?

In these small businesses there is no additional server and no tape library, a tape library usually costs more than the whole server of an SMB (this is one of the problems to me in understanding all the explanations of virtualized backups, that mostly bigger shops are refered to). There is only one single internal SCSI tape drive. If you mention a "tape proxy", than I suppose that a tape drive cannot be accessed directly from within a VM. But what exactly is a tape proxy, how will this work?

Thanks so much for you patience,
Stefano

[foggy]

Thanks, Alexander. You stated, that B&R can be installed on it's own Windows-8-Guest-VM. For being sure: Is it capable then to backup and (granular) restore files from both the other VMs (VM1, which is DC and file Server and VM2, which is Exchange Server)?

Yes.

There is only one single internal SCSI tape drive. If you mention a "tape proxy", than I suppose that a tape drive cannot be accessed directly from within a VM. But what exactly is a tape proxy, how will this work?

Any Windows server added to Veeam B&R console, to which the drive is connected.

[StefanoFereri]

Great Information, thanks!