Backup Exec 2014 - Hyper V pass through Disks

[pmevalenzuela]

Hi.

I got a VM with a pass through Disks of 10 TB formatted with GPT basic.

On the SCL it states

Pass-Through Disk The data on the pass-through disk is not backed up. File/folder-level GRT is attempted. Application-level GRT is not attempted

So I guess I will not be able to backup the pass through disks.

If I backup the VM similar to a physical server would I be able to backup the pass through disk?

Are synthetic backups supported on GPT disks as pass throughs ?

Thanks,

Paul

[Colin_Weaver]

You can backup the content using a traditional agent for windows backup running inside the VM itself (instead of a virtual agent backup).

What this support statment is saying is that the passthrough disk cannot be backed up using the snapshot mechanism of the Hyper_V host, which the virtual agent makes use of (because the passthrough disk is not actually on the host to snapshot, in effect an environmental limitation not a specific Backup Exec limitation).

[Colin_Weaver]

As regards Synthetic backups 10TB of data might be more of a problem especially if this means a very large number of small(ish) files. Synthetic backups involving large numbers of files can result in incremental stages that timewise take longer than a full backup to complete. This is because of the time to gather the extra information (per file) needed to support synthetics as well as Backup Exec being a file level product not an image level product (with the exception against Virtual Agent backups)

Unfortunately how slow a syntheric enabled incremental might be can only be found out (for a given environment) by trying it.