Searching for the right backup software

[Christian]

Hi everyone,

I'm searching for the right backup software to backup my two Hyper-V hosts. Each with 2 CPUs and 5 VMs.
In my last company I make some experience with Altaro and it works fine.

Maybe there are better or cheaper solutions out there like Veeam, Acronis, Unitrends, Uranium or Windows Backup...
Incremental backup and a fast restore time (about 1 hour) is important for me.

I'm excited to read your suggestions. Thanks a lot!


Christian

 

[mrkrad]

Veeam works great! very fast recovery too!

 

[RyC]

Another plug for Veeam, been using it with ESXi for around two years and it's never failed me when I needed it. Hopefully it's just as solid on Hyper-V

 

[markarr]

How much do you have to backup?

 

[Christian]

How much do you have to backup?

Two Hyper-V hosts with 5 VMs each. I want to spend 1.500€ max.
Altaro is 650€, Veeam 1480€ and Acronis round about 3000€.

 

[markarr]

I was asking cause Unitrends has a new version that is free up to 1tb of unique data. Hyper-V or paid version of esxi, no limits on hosts or cores.

Backup and Recovery Continuous Data Protection Products - Unitrends

 

[Diavuno]

How would you like to backup?
disk to disk? tape? clould?

any requirements like incremental/shadow copies/spinning up backups a remote VM's?

 

[Christian]

That sounds interesting markarr. I have 8 VMs with 60GB of space and 2 with 120GB. Do you have any experience with unitrends?

@Diavuno: I would like to backup to my QNAP NAS. Incremental backup is important.

 

[markarr]

The free version of Unitrends is very similar in features to Altaro outside of the replication feature. The one thing about the Unitrends is that you cant attach storage directly to the os of the vm, it needs to be a virtual disk attached to the vm. I am using it in my home lab and it works for me, I took a full backup and then it does an incremental every morning. The nice thing is that you can dig into the backup and pull files out of it even though it is a virtual disk backup.

 

[Christian]

So I have to attach a virtual disk for backup to every VM I want to backup or only to the VM where the backup software is installed?

Then I have to copy these files via Powershell to my NAS. That won't be a problem.

Is it possible to manage two hosts from one VM?

 

[markarr]

The backup VM, I put that out there cause I wasn't sure if you were backing up directly to the qnap or to local disk. You can add all the hosts to the Backup vm and mange all the backups from a single pane.

All the backups are going to be encapsulated in a vhd/vhdx, so not sure copying that to the qnap is going to be efficient. Might want to backup straight to the QNAP via iscsi.

 

[Christian]

If it's possible to backup straight to the NAS, it doesn't make sense to copy to local disc, right!
Thanks a lot for those information, I will try Unitrends tomorrow!

 

[TechIsCool]

Veeam is free if you are willing to use PowerShell to manage the jobs being run. I personally think it's going to be the simplest and best backup solution for VM's. The reason you pay is for support/updates etc.

 

[Deslok]

Is there any reason powershell script like this "Get-VM | Export-VM –Path X:\" on a schedule wouldn't be sufficient?

 

[Christian]

Any error messages?

 

[markarr]

Is there any reason powershell script like this "Get-VM | Export-VM –Path X:\" on a schedule wouldn't be sufficient?

Disk Space would be concern since it would be a full backup on a schedule.

 

[Deslok]

Disk Space would be concern since it would be a full backup on a schedule.

Wouldnt that be the case of any backup procedure doing a backup of all the vm's? (and shouldnt this be monitored and notified via zabbix/cacti/solarwinds/nagios ect.)

 

[markarr]

But doing a full backup and then incremental would allow you to have a longer retention period. All backup software have built in notification systems.

 

[andrewbedia]

What about Macrium's Reflect? They have some hyper-v version now or something.
Macrium Reflect for Business