BE 2010: Product selection?

[MIXIT]

Hi all.  I'm looking for advice on product selection.  Here's what I"m about to do:

Purchase a new server as the lone server in an organization - 2008 R2 Enterprise.  This server will have Exchange 2010 Standard, as well as SharePoint 2010 (Standard I believe) on it.  It will also be the only DC, and of course will have such things as DNS/DHCP, and also WSUS.

The goal is to use the Hyper-V role to put Exchange and Sharepoint each into their own VM.  This isn't critical, but it is ideal.  The situation might get complciated with lciensing though - I don't know how BE licensing works at all. 

So my Symantec-related question is this:  With such a configuration what is the best Symantec backup solution for me to use if my goal is to minimize server recovery time?  Obviously Image-based backups are best for that but I think I posted on here some months ago and somebody said that BE 2010 does not do image-based backups. 

Though with 2008 R2 and it's minimal time to install a base OS, recovering from tape and bringing back the System State and the data would be fairly quick still and bring that server back completely to its exact state fromt he last backup, right? 

I'm hoping somebody here can respond Who has worked with this stuff in real-world scenarios though any advice is welcome.  I don't really care if we have image-baed backups so long as the other backup method is still very quick and easy to do a complete recovery with. 

Thank you! 

[MIXIT]

Sorry, just some things that I didn't emphhsize enough on:

First, we have one external tape drive only.  Technically using BESR-SE I could send image-backups to a network share but this doesn't bring data offsite, so tape is our main way and BESR doesn't work with tape drives. 

Second, does BE 2010 require more licenses if you're using it on multiple VM's but on just one physical machine? 

[Munir2Fast]

Hi

If you are looking for image based backups then BESR (Backup Exec System Recovery) is best.

In Backup Exec for Windows Server 2010 with your current configration you need :

1 hyper-v agent license - this can backup multiple VMs.

1 exchange agent license - to backup exchange 2010

1 sharepoint agent license - to backup sharepoint 2010

Let me know if you have nay more questions...

[MIXIT]

Hi Munir,

Thanks for the reply and the info. 

I did some reading of the basic product description for the various Agents and Options, and so it looks like agents will cover everything as you said  So now the big question is: can all these agents's backups and the regular back up itself of the host OS be done all to one single tape drive, with a single tape (if enough space is available) in a single backup job?  Since the backups would run overnight, having to do any tape switching for the different backup agents would make this solution fall apart. 

And if it turns out that this can all be accomplished with a single tape backup, how easy is it to do restores?  I'll have to do some pretty comprehensive lab testing of this stuff but I'm just wondering what the quick answer is as well. 

Thanks again! 

[pkh]

This document may provide some answers

[Colin_Weaver]

Just as a general comment - even if you did have to split your job into more than one for different resource types - you could start the first job of the evening as an overwrite and then schedule every other job that runs that night as append jobs to the same tape - so really your limit if you are only going to have one tape drive is the  capacity of the tapes - not whether or not each different type of selection requires it's own job.

However for the most part you can usually put all your resource types in one job - there are however some configurations where we might recommend splitting the job - for instance if you needed the open file configuration enabled on one job but not on others then you would have to split the jobs (this is just an example)

[Munir2Fast]

It can or cannot be backed-up on a single tape depending on the size of the VMs (.vhd).

Just restoring the .vhd file for a particular VM can restore the whole server (with all the applications installed in it) after a successful backup of the same.

Using .vhd file you can start a hyper-v machine easly.

[MIXIT]

Excellent advice all around.  I'll have to do some testing once we buy the product but it looks like it'll be BE 2010 with the agents/options mentioned. 

The one thing I'm not sure of and which will come out in testing and probably some more posts on here as well is how all these agents interact with each other, if at all.   

For example, how does it work if I have the Hyper-V agent doing a backup of the VM with Exchange on it, but also have the Exchange agent doing an Exchange backup?  I assme that these will just be two backup jobs, independent of each other and so in effect I'd have a lot of space taken up on tape because of the duplicated Exchange data.

Or can the agents work together in some intellgent way, for example so that I could create a VM backup with the Hyper-V agent but via the Exchange agent, do a granular message or mailbox restore without having to have done an Exchange-specific backup? 

[pkh]

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