Platform req's for 2016 restores?

[pkelly_sts]

I know that if you need to restore a de-duped drive from a 2012 server then your mount server also needs to be 2012 with de-dupe enabled/installed.

We're in the process of bringing in our first 2016 VMs (yeah, we're not exactly bleeding-edge here) but our whole Veeam environment is 2012-based ATM.

Are there any similar caveats we need to be aware of to be able to restore 2016 servers that have 2016-specific features enabled? What sort of features are impacted by this (other than perhaps de-dupe)?

Basically looking to ensure we don't paint ourselves into a corner without a plan...

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi Paul,

thanks for the question. Basically you have two roles within Veeam that interacts directly with the filesystems of a VM by mounting it and accessing data at restore.

1) The Backup & Replication console
It will mount the drives, allow you to browse through the filesystem and our Veeam Explorers access the data over it as well.

2) The Mount Server
It will mount the filesystem and performs the selected file restores.

So whenever you use a feature like deduplication that is only compatible with a sepcific windows version, these 2 roles need to be installed on a compatible server (Win 2016 / Win10 for example).

Anyway if you have a standard server with a standard NTFS filesystem it should be no issue to process with the Windows 2012 Servers.

I would install a Windows 2016 server in the backup infrastructure just in case the restore do not work in a specific situation. Then you can change the Mount Server of the speicific repository to this server and install a console on it as well to perform the restore from there.

[pkelly_sts]

Thanks for the prompt reply which makes sense.

We have a Veeam Proxy on each host server which I consider "disposable" VMs as that's their only purpose. I think the easiest/least-disruptive plan would be to replace these with Win2016 VMs & install the roles as you describe as a backup plan just in case someone installs a dependent feature in future without consulting me.