BE virtual conversion

[tisso]

Hi,

Has anyone done BE 2012 point-in-time conversion to virtual?

The requirement is to schedule restore backup set on VM with little manual intervention.

Note that BE is on guest VM, same ESXi as VM mentioned above.

There is opt_dup between two sites, where the source and target site has deduped storage.

I'd like to have views on these:

1) Assume backup with AWS on physical. What kind of restore can be performed? What licenses needed to restore?

2) After conversion, BE creates VM snapshot which needs to be removed. Can I automate this task?

3) Assume I schedule the conversion, if the snapshots are not removed, can the following conversion still take place?

4) Can I add a stage to do point-in-time conversion after backup-and-opt duplication.

5) Any references on the best practices for this type of conversion?

Thanks

[Sameer_Kapadia · Accepted solution]

I will try to answer few of your queries, hope it helps

Licenses vary for different type of applications, database and options . For a windows system without any specific application the normal AWS license is sufficient for backup and restore.

After conversion the snapshot created by BE is sort of protection snapshot created at the end of conversion. If you have schedule conversion jobs then this snapshot will not cause any harm and then next conversion job will handle the snapshot.

You can schedule or link conversion job after full backup completes. The duplicate (opt dedup) jobs will not cause any problems unless their schedules are same. You can also schedule a conversion for point in time to run at a later time, however the repeated schedule wont be of use since it will convert single point in time. For scheduling use  "Backup up to disk and then Convert to Virtual Machine" or Back up to Disk and Simultaneously Convert to Virtual Machine"

Thanks!