Best practise? Backup one hyperv-host with 3 VMs

Hi Stefan,

1) The Standard license of Acronis Backup 12.5 (Virtual Host license) is enough for agentless backups of Hyper-V VMs and the host itself. The Advanced license will be required only if you plan to store backups on tapes, use Acronis deduplication or other advanced features. It will also be sufficient to have a single (1) Standard license in your scenario for both Hyper-V host and all VMs protection, saving these backups to a local NAS device. Note that there is no (yet) support for direct backup to Azure cloud storage, so you'll need to setup replication of the backup files to Azure by some 3rd party utilities (if you plan to have these backups in both Azure and on NAS).

2) You should install Acronis Backup 12.5 onto the Hyper-V host itself including the core management component (Acronis Management Server installed by default) and Agent for Hyper-V which will enable protection for VMs running on this host. After that you can capture backups of Hyper-V VMs and of the Hyper-V host itself.

3) To prepare for disaster it's recommended to maintain backups of the Hyper-V host itself + separate backups of each of the VM. To exclude unnecessary VM files data from host-level backup you can use "Files filters" option or simply exclude the entire disk from backup. The recovery will look like as follows: you first boot the new server (which I assume would be bare-metal) from Acronis Backup 12.5 Bootable Media (it also has to be created beforehand) and run recovery of the host by browsing the backup archive on your NAS device. Next after the server comes up after recovery you can restore the VM backups, unless your entire host backup included all data on the local disks - in this case VM recovery will be required only if the VM backups contain some more recent state than the one in host-level backup.

Thank you

Hello,

I would like to clarify the things..

In case.that Hyper V role is not the only server role, is it enough to have Acronis Backup 12.5 Virtual Host License to backup entire host and VMs? Additional server license for host server is not required?

Thank you,
Leonid.

Hi Leonid,

Additional server license won't be required for the host protection. Single license will allow both agent-less VM backup and the host backup.

Thank you.

Thank you so much!

Regards.

following your instructions i installed everything (not on the host, but on another virtual machine on a different host) and configured to backup the VMs and the Host (without the VM-files).

Everything worked like a charm, so thanks a lot.

now i have to figure out which option to purchase is the best.

i have seen, there is a subscription model and a perpetual license.

what do you think is the better option, keeping in mind that i would like to move to cloud as soon as all features are available

Hi,

Subscription license is more "universal" one as it allows both cloud and on-premise management, while with perpetual license you'll be limited to on-premise management only - see details in the bottom table here. However note that you'll need Internet access at least for activation of the subscription while with perpetual license there is no such requirement.

Thank you.

another question:

i installed acronis on a VM sitting on a hyper-v host i want to backup.

is that causing problems?

It should not cause problems unless your backup destination is a local folder inside this VM (for example a managed location on Acronis Storage Node) - in this case upon Hyper-V host backup you will be physically backing up a machine (host) into itself (inside VM) via itself (agent installed on host), which is likely to cause problems. If your backup destination is some network share which is independent from this host, then there should be no problems even having Acronis Backup (Acronis Management Server) installed inside a VM running on this host.

thanks, tested and didnt get any errors so far...

What i tried and didnt find a solution:

1. installed acronis server to a different server and try to get the agent on a server pointing to the new installation.
i had to deinstall the agent and reinstall. Is there an easier way for desaster?

2. the backups are on a network share. After reapplying all settings in acronis backup i started my backups, but the old backups were not taken to be incrementally updated, but new ones were created. Normal?

3. i was able to export plans from the old installation but not settings?Isn't there an option?

not big issues, only minor things to know

Hi,

1. There is an option to register an already installed agent which was connected to old AMS on new AMS via register_Agent.exe utility. It can be run via CLI and contains embedded help if you run it without parameters: C:\Program Files\Acronis\RegisterAgentTool\register_agent.exe . Example:

register_agent.exe -a AMS_IP -s mms

, where AMS_IP corresponds the hostname/IP of Acronis Management Server and "mms" corresponds the type of registered agent (mms = any agent).

2. You can map the backup plan to use an existing backup archive for appending the changes incrementally. This is defined in Backup File Name option. See the use cases described in the bottom of this user guide article.

3. There is no such option currently and we're planning to implement it in one of future updates (internal ID: ABR-121787), but exact timeline is not defined yet. The main issue for us here is that there is no single place where configuration is stored - there are agents, storage nodes, management server, etc. components all of which store its own configurations in different places (not necessarily on single machine), so for proper migration of entire solution - the components migration should also be considered.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot again!

Another question:

After a backup i do a replication to another network share. The only option i found was to schedule the replication. As the backup does not finish every day at the same time, i only can guess, when i have to schedule the replication.

Is there no way to schedule the replication based at triggers like finished backup?

thanks

Stefan

Hi Stefan,

Besides creating a separate backup replication plans (from "Plans" section in web console), you can instruct replication to be run right after backup plan execution - there is corresponding "2nd location" option when you create a backup plan. Simply add more locations there and the backups will be replicated as soon as they appear in the 1st  primary location:

Thank you.

perfect, good to know!