Pro/Cons of deploying Veeam v8 on Win8.1?

[BackupDude]

Greetings.

We have been using Windows 2012 virtual servers for our current Veeam 7 deployment for over year with little problems. We are looking at upgrading to Veeam V8 on new virtual machines and have been exploring the idea of using cheaper Win8.x licenses instead of server. Is there any known limitations of using Win8 for Veeam instead of server? We have been using Win8 for hot add proxies with no issues.

Anyone else using Win8 for the console portion?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Fabio,

That is a good question and I'm not aware of any limitations regarding using Windows 8.1. Are you planning to use them as proxy servers only?

Thanks!

[BackupDude]

We would be using them for both the console and proxies. We use them now for proxies but considering the jump to the console side to win8.1.

[tsightler]

The one possible gotcha that I can think of for using the console in Win 8.1 is if you are backing up any Windows 2012 or newer servers that might have dedupe enabled filesystems and you want to perform FLR of those volumes. When you perform a FLR the disk image is mounted on the Veeam console and I don't think Windows 8.1 can properly mount/read Windows 2012 dedupe volumes because I don't think it includes the dedupe filesystem features.

[Gostev]

One limitation that comes to my mind is no hot add with replication for Windows 8 proxies (see Known Issues section of the Release Notes). And one benefit is that Windows 8.1 proxies are noticeably faster with Direct SAN Access mode (when talking about performance that can only be reached with high-end storage though).