How Many SDR Disks Do I Need?

[Sublaner]

I want to back up my eight identical Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V hosts and my three Server 2008 R2 with Backup Exec 2014 SP2 virtual machines. I can't use the Hyper-V Agent to back up the media servers because I can't deselect the locally attached Backup to Disk (VHDX) drives (10 TB backups? No thanks, don't have the time or a place to put it!). My plan is to back up five HPV servers individually, and back up the Media Servers (B2D resourced deselected)and their Host servers (Hyper-V storage deselected) with round-robin jobs (1 gets 2, 2 gets 3, 3 gets 1) that run when no other jobs are running.

I have read the SDR sections of the BE Admin Guide, the Best Practices document (HOWTO74439) and the step-by-step guide (TECH180099). None of these specifically say whether I need to create a SRD disk for EACH server I want to protect, or if one per hardware/driver configuration is sufficient. I suspect the latter since machine specific data is kept in the SDR folders I have distributed all over the place. If anyone can answer that, I would appreciate your comments!

[pkh · Accepted solution]

You need one SDR disk if you don't have special drivers.  If you have special drivers for your servers, then you need to create SDR disks with these drivers.

You should test a restore to see what drivers are missing from the standard disk.

[pkh]

With your proposed setup, have you thought about how you are going to recover your servers if your data center is completely wiped out.