We are just moving customers away from VMWare to HyperV and I have got a problem at one site.
I have added a Ubuntu 24 server as a backup proxy onto the DRHost. I then added it in Veeam, and I can see it in the list of Backup Proxies, but I am unable to select it when trying to set it up in the available proxies in the job.
It isn’t greyed out, and it went through the setup pretty much okay. I did get this message:
veeam cannot find nfs mount tools on the linux machine
I am not sure if I need that though, sorry, not an expert on this bit.
At the moment the server is not in the box of available proxies.
So you don’t need to set a proxy or maintain a proxy fleet for HyperV.
You can use off-host proxies in specific circumstances, but we do not recommend off-host proxies for a long time due to complexity and fragility of the process (It requires that your VM SAN storage has a supported Hardware VSS provider from the vendor and uses transportable shadow copies to move the SAN snapshot as a VSS snapshot to the off-host proxy -- from experience in support and even on small Hyper-V environments, transportable hardware VSS snapshots are notoriously flaky and vendor support for the hardware VSS providers is challenging)
So you don’t need to set a proxy or maintain a proxy fleet for HyperV.
You can use off-host proxies in specific circumstances, but we do not recommend off-host proxies for a long time due to complexity and fragility of the process (It requires that your VM SAN storage has a supported Hardware VSS provider from the vendor and uses transportable shadow copies to move the SAN snapshot as a VSS snapshot to the off-host proxy -- from experience in support and even on small Hyper-V environments, transportable hardware VSS snapshots are notoriously flaky and vendor support for the hardware VSS providers is challenging)
That is fair enough. I will delete what I have done so far.
We have some bigger sites with shared storage and multiple sites to migrate as well. Is it the same rule for them?
Thanks,
alamb200
All Hyper-V proxies are on-host by default. You can move the role off-host to another Windows server but the requirements are specific and you don’t want to place the off-host proxy on any of boxes of the cluster you intend to backup. The link posted above is a good starting point.
That is fair enough. I will delete what I have done so far.
We have some bigger sites with shared storage and multiple sites to migrate as well. Is it the same rule for them?
Thanks,
alamb200
You’re welcome
As for the question of off-host proxy, before even exploring the option check that your storage vendor has a Hardware VSS provider.
To reiterate, our (Veeam’s) reference architecture for Hyper-V backups does not include off-host proxies -- just too much experience at all scales that tells it will have problems, but that’s not to say there aren’t working backup environments w/ off-host proxies out there. But our experience tells that there will be hiccups and it’s not so set and forget as one would like it to be.
Similarly, the performance gains range from “meh” to nominal, so the required infrastructure and knowledge to set it up may not pay out in the end.
If you can do it in your environment, I recommend test for a few weeks before fully committing your backup strategy to it, and see how it goes during those weeks and make your decision based on that. Be sure to compare the performance / backup window to that of what on-host proxies can do to make the decision.
