First time worries with Hyper-V backup

[DJ_Mo]

I am new to Hyper-V.  I installed a Windows 2012R2 Hyper V Host and have one Windows 2012R2 Hyper V guest server running.

My goal is wanting to daily full backups of our Hyper V guest server (no GRT needed).

Should I just install a normal backupexec agent on the Hyper V guest and do backups as I have been with my physical servers?Or is it better to back up using the Hyper V agent provided by BackupExec?  Cost is not a concern...but I worry about complexity of these backups.

Can someone tell me the pro/cons of doing a traditional agent backup vs Hyper V host backup?

The backup server is Windows 2008R2 and running BackupExec 15 with all the latest service packs.

-Mo

[pkh · Accepted solution]

The main drawback of backing up the VM as if it is a physical machine is recovery. To recover this machine, you need to use either SDR or manual recovery. If you use the Hyper-V agent, then you can backup and restore this VM as a VM. That is, to recover the VM, you just need to restore it's VHD's which is a lot faster. Although you say that you do not need GRT, GRT is a good thing it allows you to restore a file without having to restore the entire VM.