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Notes when Upgrading from Windows Small Business Server (SBS) to Virtualized Environment

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Jon
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NovaBACKUP Business Essentials

This article is for someone who upgrades from Windows Small Business Server to a Virtualized Environment that splits tasks across Virtual Machines.

Below is an Example Scenario: 

We have migrated our SBS server to Windows Server 2019. This is now a Hyper-V host running 3 virtual machines with Windows Server 2019 installs for each of these:
* Exchange Server
* File Server and Services
* Domain Controller

My Questions are:
1. Where should we install NovaBACKUP B.E.? On the Hyper-V host or one of the VMs?
2. The RDX is only visible on the Hyper-V host - what are my options?
3. We used to backup the SBS System State, Exchange plus all the files. Can we still do this for each VM?

 

Answer: 

NovaBACKUP Business Essentials is the single-seat backup product that is able to perform Virtual Machine, SQL, and Exchange backups.

  1. You will need to install onto the Hyper-V Host machine to be able to perform a backup of the VMs.
    • To perform a backup of Exchange, you must have NovaBACKUP Business Essentials installed onto the machine running Exchange, in this case a VM, requiring an additional license for NovaBACKUP Business Essentials.
    • WARNING: Verify your configuration is supported by NovaBACKUP before continuing by reviewing the changelog and Release Notes (scroll down to "Datasheets & Release Notes" section)
  2. Physical drives are only ever able to be directly accessed via the machine they are physically installed on, so your RDX drive can only be called directly from the Host machine. 
    • The workaround is to create a network share and target that as the storage destination from within any connected VM. 
    • This share could be on each RDX drive, or on an alternate location that you then "Copy" to the RDX drive.
  3. Virtual Machine backups are complete snapshot/copies (think Image) of the Virtual Machine at that point in time; however, Active Databases will not be in clean states when backed up this way, so you must back those up separately (Exchange is an Active Database)

 

Your previous configuration had all services installed on a single environment, so you would have only needed a single license for NovaBACKUP Business Essentials, this configuration will require TWO licenses for NovaBACKUP.