Backup strategy for BE2010 and Hyper-v (dedupe)

[Morgoth]

Hi all,

can someone please recommend the strategy for backing up Hyper-v cluster with 4 nodes and around 40 machines. The amount of data is 2,5TB.

We have 2 BE servers attached to SATA storage (FC) , deduplication option , Central admin option, SSO, and hyper-v agents.

Full backup of these machines trough Hyper-v agent lasts around 18hours (media server dedupe) so it is unacceptable to do full backup of images daily (but this would be preffered method).

Can anyone sugggest  a good strategy for backing up this system? Could we run full backup of Hyper-v machines weekly and do the incremental backups daily trough windows agents inside virtual machines (client side dedupe)? 

Thanks.

[teiva-boy]

You do know that the VHD's do NOT dedupe well right?  BE2010 R2 does vmware files great, though could be more consistent, but VHD's are poor to nothing.

The only way to get dedupe on Hyper-V is with traditional agent based backups and client-side dedupe.

To answer your questions, it's all hyper-V agent or all Agent for Windows, and not both.  So pick a FULL strategy with one or the other, and incrementals as needed.  If going with the remote agent for Windows, you can use dedupe, and a FULL/Incr schedule would be perfect.