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We are currently setting up a Server 2008 R2 which will be off-site over a leased line with VPN. At the main site is 2 x Hyper-V hosts in a failover cluster with PowerVault M3000i iSCSI SAN.

We are using BackupAssist for local backups and each host backups up itself and it's guests nightly creating a 500GB backup each which is copied to a 2TB rotated NAS drive. Files and SQL DB's are also backed up / log shipped etc.

Looking for the best way to backup the Hyper-V VM's and copy them off-site so that the OS's are only a month old and the data is a day old. The main backups are too large to transfer between backups so options discussed so far are:

Take rotating individual backups of the VM's each day and copy over, Day 1 SQL VM, Day 2 Exchange VM etc, would require more storage.

Look in to Hyper-V snapshots, however don't believe these are supported in clustering.

3rd party replication tools

PMC
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DPM both local and remote. DPM local in the data center backs up the cluster, local DPM acts as external storage location (the new version has support for that). Requires a separate server (not an expensive one, though) and gives you very efficient permanent backups.

TomTom
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  • Thanks, it sounds a great fit. We've spent a bit of money on new server / BackupAssist & WAN, if this was out of budget, do you have a plan b or is it simply worth the money for the resilience? – PMC May 17 '11 at 11:54
  • Really depends on needs. Otherwise use anything with a small local atom server in the data center using DFR-R to sync down backups over the WAN. The good thing with DPM is that it allows restores, can make backups OFTEN (incremental), integrated with the MS stack (exchange, hyper-v etc.) AND has build in facilities for replication to another server. The pain somewhere else (money) has to get quite big to offset this ;) – TomTom May 17 '11 at 12:05