Tag Archives: Backup Exec

Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions

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Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery

Together with Symantec, Mahmoud Magdy (Microsoft MVP for Exchange Server) and Mikko Nykyri (VMware vExpert) we produced a whitepaper called “Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions”. This whitepaper covers an overview about virtualization and the challenges which come with the new workloads in terms of backup and recovery.

Because of the outstanding economy, flexibility, and service levels it offers, virtualization is  transforming data centers at breakneck speed: by 2016, an estimated 80 percent of the world’s x86 servers will be virtual machines (VMs).1 But the speed of this transformation, along with  the high resource utilization, ease of cloning,  moving workloads, and other ways virtualization  works its magic, raise challenges for “traditional” IT services and the teams that deliver them. Nowhere is the complexity that virtualization creates for traditional IT services more apparent than in backup and recovery, which participants in a recent Symantec survey ranked among their least-successful IT initiatives. This paper addresses five critical decisions organizations  must make when building a backup and recovery plan to:

  • Maintain protection, visibility, and control of applications  and data.
  • Maximize utilization of established infrastructure,  processes, staff, and budget.
  • Use virtualization to improve backup and recovery processes.
  • Create an efficient, scalable, future-prepared backup and recovery environment.

Each issue is presented first in general terms that apply across IT environments, and then add comments for specific platforms, applications, or industries based on our individual experience as VMware® vExperts and Microsoft® MVPs.

You can download the whitepaper here: Symantec Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions

Make also sure you checkout the Google Hangout event on Fri, May 10, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM.

Join a panel of virtualization experts including Microsoft MVPs Mahmoud Magdy & Thomas Mauer and VMware vExpert Mikko Nykyri as they discuss the white paper they co-authored and offer their thoughts on the most important things to consider for a virtualized server environment.

 

P2V Hyper-v Migration

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Tonight I did a bigger P2V (physical 2 virtual) migration. I virtualized an older Windows Server 2003 SP1 with MS SQL Server 2005 and WSS 3.0. This can be used as a step by step how-to guide.

  • First I created a Image of the old server with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010, this could be done online. I just stopped all the Sharepoint, SQL and Web Services so that no new data could be written in the time I created this Image.
  • After I moved this Image to the Microsoft Hyper-V Host Server, I started to convert the v2i Image with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 to a Microsoft VHD.
  • I created a new Virtual Machine on the Hyper-V Server and added this existing VHD. (Important here: I tried to create the same Hardware environment for the VM which I had as physical Hardware before. (Dual Core with 2048MB memory) So I had basically no problem to start the Virtual Machine.
  • Now its time to install the Hyper-v integration components (the VM Drivers) which can only be installed on Windows Server 2003 with SP2 or later. I turned off the Virtual Machine again and attached the VHD File offline on my Hyper-v Server, so I had file access to the Virtual Hard Disk. I simply added the Servicepack 2 file to the root of the VHD.
  • After unmounting the VHD, I started my Virtual Machine again and installed the Servicepack 2 and the Hyper-v Integration components.
  • Now I added more Hardware to the Virtual Machine (Quad-Core and 4GB memory). I also change the Legacy Network Adapters to normal Network Adapters (higher Network performance)

The performance of the new Hyper-v is just pretty impressive.