Install BE 12.5 with other Software

[FroggEye]

Just looking for some insight on best practices and other thoughs about this.  Currently running BE 12.5 SP2 on Server 2003 Std SP2 with DB on Server 2008 Std SP2 with SQL 2008 Std.  All works great but we have a vituralized environment with Hyper-V and I continue to get errors about the User and ProgramData directories not being backed up with GRT. 

We only have 5 physical servers (and 5 VM's) and only one of the physical servers runs Server 2008 the others run 2003 and 2000.  From what I read (http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/311227.htm) the error I get is because the media server is on a Server 2003 box and it is trying to mount the 2008 VM's.  It says it is totally an OS issue and from what I can see if I want to get GRT on all my servers I would need to install BE on the Server 2008 box.

Here is my delima, that box is running SQL with roughly 2 small, 2 medium and 1 large database.  The databases are supporting Microsoft CRM, and 1 large website and 2 small websites as well as BE and one very small office app.  The hardware shouldn't be a problem I wouldn't think (Dual 2.20 GHz Intel Xeon, 8GB RAM, 320GB RAID5 HDD, 1GB NIC) but cannot support 64bit OS so I had to install the 32bit version.  The machine runs great but I'm afraid if I use the server as a multi-purpose SQL and BE it will become overloaded.  All backups are done between 10pm and 6am and the majority of our traffic on the websites and CRM would be during normal business hours.  I'm guessing since it's a concern of mine I probably shouldn't do it, correct?

Would it be possible to put BE on a VM and run it that way?  Would I run into any problems backing up the VM that runs BE?  Are there any docs on this type of support?

Thanks

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Hi FroggEye,

Running BE on a VM won't be an issue. My CASO server is a VM, and I don't have any issues yet (touch wood). That would basically be a means to an end in itself. As long as that BE VM can see the other servers, it should work.
The only issue you'd have here though is hardware. Unless you're load balancing between 2 hosts, how would you move your tape autoloader/drive/library if it's physically attached to 1 of the hosts? Here a SAN SSO setup would be great, as you'd present the SAN library to both hosts (across a virtual FC HBA), and it would move with the VM (thinking along the lines of our VMs in ESX here which work that way). If you've got 1 host, it will also work, but not with 2. This is where running BE as a VM would fail.
Disk speed for the BE VM will also be slower due to sharing the same disk spindles with other VMs.
As far as I know, GRT would work with just the agent being installed. That's how Exchange works at least.
As for backing up the VM itself, you'd run it exactly the same way. Backup your necessary/required folders and files.
I'll continue to dig around.

[FroggEye]

Currently on the media server (also our file server) we have 6 500GB SATA hot swappable HDD (only 1 used at a time/per day, full backups each day) on the server so I'm not writing back over the network in this instance.  In the future, I could see us having one more HyperV host but that would be it.  So of course I would have to do some more research on adding the CASO and another host to get the optimal setup for DR and load balancing.