I currently run a mixed environment that more and more is becoming a Hyper V environment.
Right now everything is backed up with a managed instance installation of Appassure and I'm just not sure that's the right way to go anymore.
We have a few appassure hosts on site, all boxes are snapped hourly and warm VMs' created... then replication to my DR partners NOC. 2-3 times a year we stand all the VM's up on their end for verification that all is well. I need all of that functionality as we are a financial institution I need to be able to bring us back up quickly for individual local server issues, or heaven forbid standup the entire network elsewhere during a major building outage.
With my physical hosts I get it and appassure works fine for those throw an agent on it snapshot hourly ok.
And yes appassure runs fine on my Hyper V boxes whether they were P2V or straight built VM's install the agent and it'll snapshot them hourly.... but I wonder is that really the best way to handle my VM's?
I mean a VM is a giant file the contains all information about the server itself... it seems that there should be a faster way to just backup the VM file itself using appassure or another product....
Secondly I don't currently backup my 2 (soon to be 3) 2012 Hyper V hosts as the company that handles my appassure deployment recommended against it, but I also wonder about that. If I have an issue with my host yes I can standup the appasure snapped VM's as VM's...but I'm now on my own in terms of the host whether its a rebuild, repair whatever....
Since I will continue to need the ability to standup the environment elsewhere (yet we don't have our own separation location) I'm not sure if there are any providers who can help me with potentially moving to another product that still handles physical boxes, but is more aware of VM's and IMO can handle their backup quicker... or maybe I'm wrong about how its supposed to work.
Any thoughts?