Pre-sales for a Windows 2012 R2 VM setup

Licenses are needed only for agents that actually perform backups, not for storage or management components. If you need agentless backup - you can use 2x 11.5 Virtual Edition for HyperV, installed on each host. If not - 2x 11.5 Advanced Server for Windows licenses, with agent installed inside each VMs. Such license covers agents on up to 4 VMs on the same host.
Management Server and Storage Node (for a vault on tape) do not need separate license.

Fedor,

Thanks so much.

So, I get two licenses of either Virtual Edition or Advanced Server for the servers (which covers both the physical OS and the VMs), then desktop agents for my other machines, and I'm good to go?

Is there any advantage/disadvantage to running agentless? I've not found a FAQ which describes the differences. I do have a VHDX which is sitting on a bitlocker'd drive - this VHDX is provided to one of the VMs as a disk, which uses it to host a file share. I'd much rather backup the files sitting on this VHDX rather than the VHDX itself, seeing that the VHDX can conceivably grow to at least a few TB (and I'll probably make it fixed size to keep performance reasonable, so in the beginning it will be mostly empty space...).

-Jan

Yes. I forgot to say that Virtual Edition for Hyper-V license allows installation of physical agent inside VM too. In your case of just four VMs there may no tangible advantage (like no need to install agent that simplifies centralized management)
Some info regarding agentless backup is here http://www.acronis.com/support/documentation/ABR11.5/index.html#12508.h…
Size of backup will be roughly the same whether you backup the VM as VM (VHD data will be backed up in decrypted state, and only sectors with data will be saved) or files from inside share. If its size in in terabytes range, I'd chose disk backup from inside VM or agentless backup rather than file backup)

Fedor,

Fantastic, thanks so much for this information.

I do have one last question: I need to backup desktops which are using whole-disk encryption. I don't need to backup sector-by-sector - filesystem backup is okay. I don't need the data itself to be captured in an encrypted state (reading/backing up the unencrypted data is fine, as I will encrypt the resulting tape), and I don't need it restored in an encrypted state (i.e. if I do a whole machine restore, it can be unencrypted).

What options do I have here? Will the agents for the desktops work? And if so, will I be able to restore the disks to a bootable state (or to VHDs) using filesystem based backups?

I'm using Truecrypt right now, but am happy to move to most any solution that will work while still encrypting my desktop's OS disks.

Thanks so much,

-Jan

Backing up a a whole-disk-encrypted disk is such a thing that it's better to test it before - see http://kb.acronis.com/content/1649 for a brief list . In case of bitlocker, data is captured in decrypted state on live system, so if you restore it bare-metal, you'll have to re-enable encryption, and that's all. It may go not that smoothly with some encryption products.

> And if so, will I be able to restore the disks to a bootable state (or to VHDs) using filesystem based backups?
'Filesystem backups' in Acronis terms are called disk/volumes backups (just to be not confused with file backups). They may be restored bare-metal (see above). 'File backup' - i.e. backup of just files, such as a backup of network share can't be restored to bare metal system.

Fedor,

Thank you kindly for all of this information. You've been very helpful and informative.

-Jan