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Is anyone successfully using Unitrends (or any other backup method) to backup up their primary Hyper-V machines while also using Hyper-V Replica to a standby host?

Are there any special backup considerations when HVReplica is in use?

I have already discussed this with Unitrends support and they say it’s no problem, but I tried it for a few days in January and it was disastrous; it seemed like my backups and the replication were fighting each other.

3 Spice ups
2

Steve - I do believe that Unitrends can do this. Was there a scheduling issue that was causing jobs to fail?

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I was getting tons of event log errors about files being locked, and Unitrends started finding lots of new “volumes” on the Hyper-V server that I did not create. Support helped me exclude those unknown volumes from my backups, but I have gotten warnings ever since, which I was told to disregard. My reports have been all “yellow” ever since; I miss seeing “green.”

At this point, I’m not so concerned about the quality of my Unitrends backups since they have proven to be solid, but I’m wondering how others are dealing with running backups and Replica simultaneously.

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Steve - Thanks for that clarification. Any reason why you’re not using the replication tools built in to Unitrends?

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Are you backing up your primary Hyper-v host and your replica with Unitrends?

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6

We just have the NFR, since my boss wants me to build an empire without spending money… I only intend to backup the primary, which support agreed was the best way to go about doing this.

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Gotcha. Just checking to see if your errors were coming from backing up the replica. We went through the same discussion with Unitrends, and they mentioned that you only need to backup the primary host (common sense, right?) and their licensing reflects that.

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8

So are you currently using Unitrends and HVR? If so, any issues?

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I am not. We ultimately decided on DPM with System Center 2012 for our Hyper-v backups.

10

Got any stats on how one performed over the other? I’m not partial either way, but you used the word “decided” so that may be of use to others that are looking!

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One thing to keep in mind with stats it that every environment will have a different backup speed, based upon the connectivity, data types, data sizes, and other traffic on the network.