Acronis Backup & Recovery

Selecting a host that will perform conversion

Specify the machine that will perform the conversion. The machine has to have Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Agent for Windows, Agent for ESX/ESXi or Agent for Hyper-V installed.

Take into account the following considerations.

  Which agent is installed on the host?  

The resulting virtual machine type and location depend on the agent that resides on the selected host.

• Agent for Windows is installed on the host

  You have a choice of virtual machine types: VMware Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC, or Parallels Workstation. Files of the new virtual machine will be placed in the folder you select.

• Agent for ESX/ESXi is installed on the host

  A VMware virtual machine will be created on the ESX/ESXi server.

  Virtual machines resulting from backup are not supposed to be backed up and so do not appear on the management server, unless its integration with VMware vCenter Server is enabled. If the integration is enabled, such machines appear as unmanageable. A backup policy cannot be applied to them.

• Agent for Hyper-V is installed on the host

  You can choose between creating a virtual machine on the Hyper-V server and creating a VMware Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC or Parallels Workstation machine in the folder you select.

  Virtual machines created on the Hyper-V server as a result of backup, will not appear on the management server, because such machines are not supposed to be backed up.

  What is the host's processing power?  

The conversion task will be created on the machine being backed up, and will use this machine’s date and time. In fact the task will be executed by the host that you select and so will take that host’s CPU resource. If multiple backup plans use the same host, multiple conversion tasks will be queued on that host and it may take considerable time to complete them all.

  What storage will be used for the virtual machines?   

Network usage

As opposed to ordinary backups (TIB files), virtual machine files are transferred uncompressed through the network. Therefore, using a SAN or a storage local to the host that performs conversion, is the best choice from the network usage standpoint. A local disk is not an option though if the conversion is performed by the same machine that is backed up. Using a NAS also makes good sense.

Disk space

On VMware ESX/ESXi, new machines are created with pre-allocated disks. This means that virtual disk size is always equal to the original disk capacity. Assuming that the original disk size is 100 GB, the corresponding virtual disk will occupy 100 GB even if the disk stores 10 GB of data.

Virtual machines created on a Hyper-V server or workstation type machines (VMware Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC or Parallels Workstation) use as much disk space as the original data occupies. Since the space is not pre-allocated, the physical disk on which the virtual machine will run is expected to have sufficient free space for the virtual disks to increase in size.