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Regular Windows Agent Vs VMware Agent

DrewMcIntire
Level 2

I am currently running BE 2014 for 8 servers. Two of the servers are physical servers and the remaning 6 are virtual. As of now I have 8 licenses for Windows Agents. What are the Pros and Cons of switching to 2 Windows Agent Licenses and 1 VMware Licnese to cover the 6 virtual machines?

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Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

Main Pro for the VMware agent license is that you can do a single backup and then have the option to do a complete VM restore or a single file restore from that one backup.

 

If you only do agent based backups then in order to do a complete DR restore of the whole VM you would either have to make use of booting an empty VM off the SDR disk (more manual steps and takes more time) or manually install a clean Operating System into a VM, install RAWS onto it and then do you restore (takes a lot more time with a lot more manual steps)

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Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

Main Pro for the VMware agent license is that you can do a single backup and then have the option to do a complete VM restore or a single file restore from that one backup.

 

If you only do agent based backups then in order to do a complete DR restore of the whole VM you would either have to make use of booting an empty VM off the SDR disk (more manual steps and takes more time) or manually install a clean Operating System into a VM, install RAWS onto it and then do you restore (takes a lot more time with a lot more manual steps)

M_Strong
Level 4

Semi-related, not trying to hijack the thread:  I am looking to make a case for the VMWare agent vs. the RAWS agent methodology for our backup strategy.

Aside from the above advantages - and without having any deduplication licenses - Are there any space savings recognized by using the VMWare agent / VM backup method in place of a basic RAWS backup?
(ie.  Backing up the same Windows server using both methods, will one backup-set be decidedly smaller?)

Not having the VMWare license or a budget for it, I have not been able to benchmark the two methods for identifying any differences.

Also, is there any advantage to having the VMWare license for VMWare level backups in conjunction with the Application & Database license?  If using the VMWare level backup method provides the ability to restore individual files, then we should be able to restore SQL database files if needed?
Or, (I'm guessing here) the VM level backup will not truncate the SQL logs during the backup, so any SQL data file backed up using the VMWare method might not be restorable, unless the database was backed up by SQL and then the SQL generated database.bak file could be restored independantly.
And - Same question regarding Exchange DBs - If using only VMWare level backups do we lose the ability to perform GRT restores?

 

              Much appreciated,