I'm in the process of planning a virtualised deployment of Essentials as follows: W2012R2 standard installed on bare metal with Hyper-V role enabled. First VOSE license installed as guest: W2012R2 with Essentials role (we are above 25 users) and second VOSE license installed as member server for WSUS / other requirements. I am aware I will need CALs for Windows (and RDS, but i'm not going to be using this).
I'm trying to figure out my backup strategy for this scenario.I'd like to be able to:
a) recover the host and the guest VMs if needed
b) recover a VM if a Windows Update goes wrong (for example)
c) recover individual files from VMs (if someone deletes a file from a shared drive for example)
d) spin up the VMs on a new host if the existing host dies
A few scenarios come to mind:
- Windows Server Backup on the host to rotated external USB drives or NAS (if this is possible). If I choose this method, can I retrieve individual files that are stored on the Essentials VM (say someone deleted a file in a shared folder)? Does anyone know
how this works in a virtualised scenario?
- Azure backup from the Essentials VM - this could be a useful emergency to have a copy of the shared file data.
- Veeam or Unitrends to backup the VMs...
Does anyone have any advice or practical experience to share?
thanks