Backup Exec 16: Protecting Microsoft Hyper-V

[udaysinh_patil]

Introduction:

This blog provides information about Backup Exec 16 support for Hyper-V on Windows 2016. You can use Backup Exec 16 to protect your Hyper-V environments. This blog provides information about Backup Exec 16 support for Hyper-V on Windows 2016. For detailed information about installing and managing Backup Exec 16 and the Agent for VMware and Hyper-V, refer to the Backup Exec 16 Administrator's Guide. You can download trial version of Backup Exec 16 at https://www.veritas.com/product/backup-and-recovery/backup-exec.

Virtualization is already established as a way to go forward due to various benefits it provides. Many business critical applications are housed in virtual machines, hence it becomes very important protect these virtual machines. It has been an exciting journey of Backup Exec 15 from Feature Pack 1 (FP1) to Feature Pack 5 (FP5) and now we have Backup Exec 16 (BE 16) release. Backup Exec 16 features proliferations for Windows 2016 and the latest Microsoft applications with full support of all the Backup Exec capabilities.

Hyper-V with Backup Exec 16:

Backup Exec’s ability for protecting Hyper-V virtual machines, complete with full and incremental backups, deep Granular Restore (GRT) support for applications, as well as technologies such as disk optimization and deduplication are now available for Hyper-V on Windows 2016.

Instant GRT:

Backup administrators are finding it hard to protect the environment in the stipulated backup window. The new Instant GRT feature greatly helps solve this problem by completely eliminating the need to perform a GRT cataloging operation after virtual machine backups.

Prior to this feature, the default cataloging option was to “Run a full catalog operation as a part of backup job”. This required several minutes, often tens of minutes. Instant GRT a simple yet powerful feature that allows you to create GRT enabled backup jobs that capture only the minimum information necessary for cataloging and later on generated at runtime during restore browse. Veritas has reports that show up to 18% to 50% improved performance for virtual backups depending upon configuration and application hosted on the virtual machine.

To know more about Instant GRT feature, refer the following blog: Backup Exec and Instant GRT.

Instant Recovery (IR):

Backup exec introduces Instant Recovery (IR) for Virtual Machines which help to reduce the restore time for a Virtual Machine (VM) to a great extent. Instant Recovery (IR) of a VM starts VM directly from the backup set located on Backup Exec storage. With need to validate backup quickly or a quick action on restoring a production machine or to test a critical patch on a machine without affecting production setup this feature helps immensely.

With Backup Exec 16, backup administrators can use the Instant Recovery feature for the Virtual machines hosted on Windows 2016 Server. All the IR functionalities work for VMs hosted on with Windows 2016 Server. To know more about Instant Recovery (IR) feature, refer the following blog: Instant Recovery of Hyper-V 2016 VMs with Backup Exec 16.

Many more features:

Backup Exec has been always on the frontline protecting Hyper-V; and this goes for Windows 2016 as well. Following are the important features that will continue to work for Windows 2016 as well.

• Protection of Hyper-V host servers and virtual machines running on various server operating systems. Image-level backups of both online and offline virtual machines.
• Protection of Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) configurations or legacy LUN configurations
• Applications and also GRT for various versions of Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and AD. For example, email-level restore from virtual machine backups of Exchange servers, email-level restore from virtual machine backups of Exchange servers, DB-level restore from virtual machine backups of SQL servers.
• Hyper-V Full, Incremental, and Differential Backups
• Multiple storage optimizations such as Block Optimization and Data Deduplication
• Supports Live Migration between Hyper-V hosts.
• Protection of various Disk Configurations like Fixed Size disk, Dynamically Expanding disk, Differencing disk, Differential disk, MBR configured disk, ReFS configured disk, GPT configured disk, NTFS configured disk, MS Dedupe configured disk.
• Supports various physical machine conversion mechanisms like Convert to Virtual (P2V), Backup to Virtual (B2V), Point-in-Time Virtual Conversions (PIT), One Time Conversions (OTC) with various OS’s and applications.

Please note that Backup Exec media server operating system needs to be of same or higher version than the virtual machine OS for application GRT (Granular Recovery Technology) backups. See the complete Software Compatibility List (SCL) for Backup Exec 16 at http://www.veritas.com/docs/000115689.