tl;dr summary: Is there any way of configuring Backup Exec 2014 to perform incremental backups of Hyper-V guest operating systems that doesn't result in a full backup of the guest VM being created each time an incremental backup is run?
I'm looking for some clarification / better understanding of using Backup Exec 2014 to perform incremental backups of Hyper-V virtual machines.
I am running a Backup Exec 2014 Media Server on a Windows Server 2012 R2 host. This media server backs up a couple of separate virtualization host servers in our environment. The virtulization host servers are running Windows Server 2012 R2, and each host server hosts several Windows-based (2003 through 2012 R2) guest operating systems. The Backup Exec Agent for Windows is installed on the virtualization host servers, as well as the various guest operating systems.
I would like to perform a full backup of the Hyper-V guest operating systems once a week, and a differential or incremental backup of the guest operating systems every other day of the week. However, it appears that every backup of the guest OSes, whether full or incremental, results in a full backup being performed (at least judging from the amount of disk space the backups are consuming.)
I have reviewed the following Symantec support URLs,
http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/incremental-backup-hyper-v-vms
and
which pertain to earlier versions of Backup Exec and Windows Server, and basically state that differential or incremental backups of Hyper-V guests is not possible, because Microsoft doesn't provide any API to perform such backups of Hyper-V guest OSes.
However, the Backup Exec 2014 Agent for Hyper-V documentation states "This version of Backup Exec supports the Windows Server 2012 vhdx file format and Microsoft incremental backups" (p. 884) and also describes differences between Backup Exec incremental backups for Hyper-V and Microsoft incremental backups for Hyper-V.
So, my questions are:
- Do incremental backups of Hyper-V guests require the guest VMs to be using .VHDX format for their virtual hard disks for incremental backups to work properly?
- Is there any way of using Backup Exec to perform incremental backups of Hyper-V guest operating systems that don't result in a full backup being created each time an incremental backup is run?
What are the best practices here? I like the idea of performing backups of the Hyper-V guests running on the host server, but with every backup essentially being a full backup, I don't have enough backup storage capacity. I could back up each Hyper-V guest OS as a "native" server, but then I lose the ability to quickly restore a full VM; I'd have to restore as if it were a physical server.
Any guidance or clarification would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!