Migrating BE2012 to hyper-v

Hyper-V does not support any pass-thru so you will be even more restricted in your choice of backup media if you use a Hyper-V VM for your media server.

What backup destination are you tend to use? If you are using tape media, just don't do it. It will not work, and if you get it to work the performance will be slow.

Please bare in mind that you are putting your eggs in one basket. If your storage or hyper-v cluster fails, you lose your backupserver as well as your configuration data and catalogs. It will take a significantly high amount of time to restore. It's best-practice not to do this. It works that's for sure, i already tested backup exec in a vm (no tape devices).

CraigV: it's actually supported. See Software Compatibility List of 2012:

"6. A Backup Exec Server can be installed on a VMware or Hyper-V virtual machine that is running a supported Microsoft Windows operating system."

However there are some limitations, such as hardware pass-through.

But a virtual machine can perfectly work as a media server for a two-way ndmp backup setup whereby the tape drives are directly attached to an NDMP filer. This setup works like a charm and your backup server can be protected by the hardware (such as NetApp) snapshot/backup technology.

my tape drive is storageworks MSL 4048 and a NAS.

The question is whether you can access the tape library from the VM where you installed BE.  If I am not mistaken, you can't.

If you attach the tape drive to the Hyper-V host and then install BE on the host, you would be able to access the tape library.  In this case, your Hyper-V host must be running a full version of the OS and not the Core edition.

I don't think it's supported to install your backupsoftware on your hypervisor. I took a look into the Software Compatibility List and the release notes without finding anything mentionable.

Make sure you get this right before installing it in this manner.