What Are You Doing Right Now
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@dustinb3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@tim_g said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@black3dynamite said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@brandon220 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Wondering why KVM is the flavor of the month but not for production because of backup options....
Besides the lack of backup options like incremental VM backups. Open source, free, flexible, etc...
If you want great, solid, do-it-with-your-eyes-closed enterprise level backup, you need to pay money, no matter your hypervisor. It's as simple as that.
Cough cough... xen orchestra cough cough!
Well if Xen is your forté, and you can justify not using a better option, go for it.
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@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@black3dynamite said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@brandon220 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Wondering why KVM is the flavor of the month but not for production because of backup options....
Besides the lack of backup options like incremental VM backups. Open source, free, flexible, etc...
That's all available already, just normal file level backups. You just have to do some scripting to create a snapshot before doing the backup and remove it after.
When creating a snapshot, would it be best to pause the VM first and then create snapshots and then resume?
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@black3dynamite said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@black3dynamite said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@brandon220 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Wondering why KVM is the flavor of the month but not for production because of backup options....
Besides the lack of backup options like incremental VM backups. Open source, free, flexible, etc...
That's all available already, just normal file level backups. You just have to do some scripting to create a snapshot before doing the backup and remove it after.
When creating a snapshot, would it be best to pause the VM first and then create snapshots and then resume?
That is the recommended approach, and what all snapshot mechanisms do.
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I've done a ton of exports in Hyper-V but no snapshots.
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@brandon220 Opposite of me
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My favourite backup solution is SCDPM (for the Hyper-V world), but it's so expensive, making most other paid options way better.
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@wirestyle22 I always do exports to external drives as another disaster recovery copy and then take to another location.
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@brandon220 I've done one P2V migration
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@tim_g said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
My favourite backup solution is SCDPM (for the Hyper-V world), but it's so expensive, making most other paid options way better.
And it's anything but reliable. Ok, that's not exactly true, but it's definitely nothing you want to run as a small shop. I still remember tons of cryptic errors in 2012 and 2012r2
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
And it's anything but reliable.
SCDPM 2016 is extremely reliable, more so than anything I've ever used... ever, as far as paid backup solutions go. But yeah, I won't use it in typical SMB because there are other options that are cheaper that are good too.
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But it's great if you have a ton of Hyper-V hosts, ton of data, and need lots of different backup configurations and schedules along with the whole tape ordeal.
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@tim_g
How long did it take you to setup SCDPM? That's a lot of work to install a backup system.
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@black3dynamite said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@tim_g
How long did it take you to setup SCDPM? That's a lot of work to install a backup system.
Not long.
It's just installing:
- Set up server hardware and DAS
- Install Windows Server 2016 Standard CORE + Hyper-V Role
** You need features Hyper-V Server does not offer for this, so rare use-case exception here ** - Set up MS SQL (VM1) (SCDPM includes license for this)
- Set up SCDPM (VM2)
Pre-planning it all makes it go fast.... above was just quick from distant memory, but it's the basics at a high level.
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@black3dynamite said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@tim_g
How long did it take you to setup SCDPM? That's a lot of work to install a backup system.
you begin by installing a full blown SQL Server as a backend database. + (At least in in 2012R2) you need to take care of a backup of DPM itself for disaster recovery. As far as I remember, you'll need a working domain to restore data. But it's years ago, things my have changed.
It's a good product, don't get me wrong. But it's major league.
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@black3dynamite said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@tim_g
How long did it take you to setup SCDPM? That's a lot of work to install a backup system.
you begin by installing a full blown SQL Server as a backend database. + (At least in in 2012R2) you need to take care of a backup of DPM itself for disaster recovery. As far as I remember, you'll need a working domain to restore data. But it's years ago, things my have changed.
It's a good product, don't get me wrong. But it's major league.
Yeah it's better now. Really, you'd use your existing MS SQL server, and replicate it to your SCDPM server host. This way, you always have a restorable replica so you can always restore.... as well as replicate your SCDPM VM (not the storage repository)
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Then you could replicate your DAS to another location/building/site, as well as archive it to tape periodically.
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Looks like they improved a few things. But I'll go for Veeam this time, even with ultra-cheap MS EDU licensing.
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Looks like they improved a few things. But I'll go for Veeam this time, even with ultra-cheap MS EDU licensing.
In one case, Veeam cost twice as much as SCDPM. So it's a toss up. Unitrends came in at the lowest.
Veeam can be super expensive. But people do it often without weighing other options first.
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@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Looks like they improved a few things.
A lot actually, like 10-fold. I posted some stuff on this like a year ago, but it's even better than that now.
Backups of SQL servers every 15 minutes happen like instantly... hourly backups happen instantly. Daily backups of huge file servers happen very quick. Archive stuff is great. Splitting where backups go, etc... some parts back up to SSD, some to internal storage, some to DAS... it's great.
The change tracking on Hyper-V 2016 is awesome now, and SCDPM takes full advantage of it... so you don't have to rely on a 3rd party backup software using their own buggy drivers to do it.
Tape tracking/management is super easy.
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@tim_g said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Looks like they improved a few things. But I'll go for Veeam this time, even with ultra-cheap MS EDU licensing.
In one case, Veeam cost twice as much as SCDPM. So it's a toss up. Unitrends came in at the lowest.
Veeam can be super expensive. But people do it often without weighing other options first.
That surely depends on your environment. I agree, costs can explode quickly once you leave the "get 3 hosts backed up for cheap"-field. On the other hand - if you are this large, you probably have other things to worry about than 1,5k USD/socket for backup.
