Install of Veeam 8 on vCenter VM. Good idea?

[arkroyal]

I am in the process of evaluating Veeam Backup 8 Free Edition in a new virtualized environment.

I have a ESXi 5.5 host on a Dell PowerEdge server and so far have created just a single Virtual Machine on which I have installed W2K8 and vCenter 5.5. I have registered my vCenter server in Veeam and I have performed an initial full backup of the virtualized vCenter server ok.

Can I do a full restore of the vCenter server from Veeam running on the vCenter itself? I assume that the server needs to be offline/shutdown to be able to fully restore. Would it be a better idea to install Veeam on a different server to manage restores to the vCenter server?

Any advice gratefully accepted.

[Shestakov]

Hello and welcome to the forums!
You can perform a restore not to original location, creating an additional VM not harming the initial one. And you need a standalone host for it. Please review this topic.

Install of Veeam 8 on vCenter VM. Good idea?

Not at all. You will get an error if you install Enterprise Manager or Veeam One on the same VM with vCenter.

Would it be a better idea to install Veeam on a different server to manage restores to the vCenter server?

I believe it would in terms of reliability and resource consumption.
If you install VBR on the same VM with vCenter, I`d suggest to use another machine as veeam backup proxy(not available in Free version), to decrease the load.

Thanks.