SBS 2008 Backup Scenarios: SBS 2008 Premium on Hyper-V, and SBS 2008 Standard on Physical Hardware

Cost effective local and remote backup options and best practices

In May 2009, we presented to the SMB IT Professional Brisbane group’s spotlight session on Backups and Storage.

Specifically, we were asked to talk about BackupAssist in the following two scenarios:

• SBS 2008 Premium installation, virtualized onto one single server
• Second Server License (WS2K8) installed on hardware, running GUI mode and Hyper-V Role
• Main Server License (SBS2K8 Std) virtualized as a guest on this hardware
• Second Server License (WS2K8) virtualized as a guest on this hardware
• What are your recommendations as to configuration/optimizations for allowing the best use of your software in this scenario?  (Remembering that Hyper-V does not pass USB through to the guest VMs.)
• SBS 2008 Standard installation installed directly on hardware
• Obviously, less time assigned to this as it is a much simpler scenario.

Our presentation addresses these two specific scenarios, outlining our recommended setups, and including pricing information for both software and hardware.

We also unlock the secrets of how to:

• Protect your servers for fast disaster recovery – server rebuilds in under an hour, to dissimilar hardware
• Restore individual Hyper-V VMs, migrate VMs, and other tasks that Microsoft themselves haven’t documented
• Protect Exchange Server at both an information store level and mailbox level
• Achieve simple Exchange archiving by using the Journaling feature combined with the BackupAssist Mailbox Add-on
• Achieve automatic Internet based backup using Rsync
• Restore guest files from your host’s backup
• Select the best backup device based on speed requirements – eSATA, USB, rdx, etc.
• Monitor the backups of multiple of server deployments from one location

This is a must-read for all techies who use SBS 2008.