Your best option would probably be to purchase BESR Virtual Edition:

http://www.symantec.com/business/backup-exec-syste....

This is licensed per host and gives you unlimited BESR server licenses to use in your Windows guest machines (only applies to Windows, not Linux).

Hope that helps.

Would dynamic VHDs be a problem ? I read some where on these forums (and can't seem to find that thread again) that Backup Exec System recovery and Backup Exec doesn't supports dynamic vhd ?

is that true ?

I know they don't support VMs with a Physical Pass through disk attached.

Thanks

This is taken from the BESR 2010 user guide:

To create a backup of a running virtual machine, the following conditions must be met:

The guest virtual machine should be configured to only use basic disks, not dynamic disks.
This is the default for installing a Windows virtual machine.

If you attempt to perform a backup when the conditions above are not met, Backup
Exec System Recovery creates a system state recovery point that is
crash-consistent.Acrash-consistent recovery point captures the virtual machine
as if it had experienced a system failure or power outage.

NOTE: there are other conditions but I've just copied the one that relates to your query.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply ; I think we got confused on "Fixed Size VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) and Dynamic VHDs (Virtual hard Disks)"

A virtual machine uses a VHD which is either FIXED or Dynamic VHD (Expands as required)

The Disks are Basic on our Servers - so seems like it should be ok.

Now, I came across this thread : https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/besr2010-symsnapsys-bsod

Is this true that BESR 2010 won't be able to backup a running VM (Windows 2003, 2008, 2008R2) ? with all integration services installed ?

I am planning to install BESR 2010 in a VM of 2008R2 (testing) and then push agent to a 2003R2, 2008 VM and backup them upto a NAS.

I have the trial I downloaded, would it give me the functionality to push agents to a couple or 4 machines (VMs) and back them up ?

Kind Regards
Thanks for your replies.