Backup Exec 2012 V-Ray

[SCS_Alex]

Please bear with me as I am not a certified IT technician and my expertise is limited.

My company has two physical machines at an off-site colocation server center. Both are running Windows Server 2008 R2, and both are using Hyper-V to host some virtual machines:

• Physical Machine A
  • Virtual Machine 1
  • Virtual Machine 2
     
• Physical Machine B
  • Virtual Machine 3

Due to the nature of what these virtual machines are used for I need to be able to backup & restore specific files on each virtual machine. Creating backups of the entire virtual machine is not an option. 

Physical Machine B currently has Backup Exec 2010 installed. When I deployed Backup Exec 2010, I ran into a slightly irritating problem: I couldn't backup files directly from Virtual Machine 3. As a matter of fact, it seemed that there was no way that Physical Machine B could communicate with Virtual Machine 3 via any network protocols at all. This holds true for Physical Machine A with Virtual Machines 1 & 2. Each virtual machine can communicate with each other over the network just fine. Virtual Machines 1 & 2 can communicate with Physical Machine B, and Virtual Machine 3 can communicate with Physical Machine A. 

I probably should have contacted Symantec the moment I ran into this problem, but I instantly came up with a way to work around the problem: I configured a standard Windows Server Backup job on Virtual Machine 3 to store backups on Physical Machine A and then configured Backup Exec 2010 on Physical Machine B to backup those backups. Needless to say that any time I need to restore files that belonged to Virtual Machine 3 is a royal pain in the rear. 

Now for the question: would Backup Exec 2012's "V-Ray" feature allow me backup individual files on Virtual Machine 3 directly to my media on Physical Machine B without requiring the work-around I've established? My ultimate goal is to backup specific files on all virtual machines to an external hard drive that is connected to Physical Machine B via USB. Which licenses, and how many, would be most appropriate? 

[lmosla]

Hi,

The Backup Exec 2012 v-Ray edition is a licensing solution for a virtualized environment. It doesn't give any additional features that are different from the standard Backup Exec 2012 version.

Please read over this helpful blog by Kate Lewis "What's included in the Backup Exec V-Ray Edition?"

[pkh]

Your communication problems is a networking problem.  I suspect that the various machines are in 2 subnets or VLAN's and routing has not been established across these subnets/VLANS.  You should get somebody with networking expertise to help you establish communication between all the machine, real and virtual.  Once that is done, you should be able to backup everything from the media server, without the workaround.

[Colin_Weaver]

Agree with pkh you description highlights a network issue not a Backup Exec issue and the v_ray licensing is just a bundle the software works the same way as standard licensing with core, VMware agent and application agent licenses.

Backup Exec protecting virtual environments requires the media serevr(s) to be able to communcaite to the subnets/vlans of the virtual servers and requires both name resolution and unique server names across all virtual environments that are protected by a single Backup Exec environment. This can cause problems for hosting providers who completely separate the virtual networks and use the same machine names within multiple virtual networks. The requirement is slightly reduced if you only need to DR the complete VMs and not perform individual file and e-mail restores.

Also I know you mentioned that your current backup method is a royal pain when it comes to restoring - if you are not already aware of it and are doing flat file backups of disk storage then please familairize yourself with this document:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH176061