Hyper-V and VMware Guest can System state backup and restore?

Morning!

VM backups are image-level backups. You can get your guaranteed system state via application-aware processing being enabled. Otherwise if it’s disabled then the backups are crash consistent. Whilst this isn’t a 100% match to the barebones “System State” backup. You could exclude any additional disks and exclude additional folders to make this more minimal if needed. Truth be told though that isn’t necessary as an incremental backup is so quick and as you’re leveraging hypervisor snapshot functionality, the system state is within seconds of when you pressed backup. For recovery of system state quickly, you can use Quick Rollback functionality to revert to a backup by only replacing the changed blocks. Or you could leverage instant VM recovery to run your VM from backup, this is also rapid recovery.

Veeam have documentation (and as they are a major partner of Microsoft I trust they have certification/validation) for their Veeam agent, which is available here: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforwindows/userguide/system_state_backup.html?ver=60

USB media doesn’t need to be created by the physical server, you can utilise the Veeam application on the server to create an ISO that you could store elsewhere and put on disc/USB/out-of-band management such as iLO/iDRAC when necessary.

As an extra note, if you had issues restoring to a physical server (let’s assume that the hardware available from vendor doesn’t match with what you had) you can instead load extra drivers to perform the recovery, overcoming a major limitation of system state backup, and Veeam can perform restores of the backups to VM or cloud as well even if the source was physical, through a built in conversion process. Functionality such as Instant VM recovery is also available so you can have incredibly low RTO times.

I’ll need you to clarify on point 3 what the ask is