Hyper-V Story of Bill, Ted, and Matthew

Our story began many months ago, in a small, but very techy town on the eastern coast of Florida. The small office building couple of blocks from the beach was home to two young, small, but promising companies – let’s call them Bee Business Solutions and Tee Technologies.

Both companies had an IT team of one – Bill handled Bee’s systems, and Ted worked in Tee. Needless to say, they were best buddies.

Almost at the same time, they realized that their companies have run out of server capacity, as they needed to run more data workloads. But they didn’t have the budget to buy more servers. So, they decided to use Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization technology on old servers instead.

After a minor incident with data, they both realized they needed backup. Yet, they could not agree on what is good for them. Bill insisted to use the widely advertised VM backup and recovery solution (V) that protected his VMs with agentless backup, while Ted argued – “What about the Windows host? What if the whole machine is dead, what would you do?”

Bill put a deaf ear to that argument, and convinced his boss to buy expensive V anyway. Ted, however, decided to protect entire setup and decided to use Acronis Backup 12, which protected his VMs with agentless backup as well, but also backed up the host Windows. Also, Ted saved quite a bit of his limited IT budget, as Acronis Backup 12 was much more affordable than V.

The backup was running well for Bill and Ted, and both were happy, wisely storing copies of their backups off-site, way outside of Florida.

Mmmm, hold on. Who is Matthew you ask? Good question.

Matthew is here. Being a Category-3 hurricane, it may pack winds of up to 130 mph, but it does not move very quickly. Eventually it did come. And yes - it damaged the office building (along with hundreds more), while Bill, Ted, and their families were in evacuation center away from the wrath of Matthew. Unfortunately, Matthew also took both Hyper-V servers with it.

The companies were ready for disasters, repaired the damage, ordered replacement servers, which were delivered the same day. Both companies needed to return to business – they already lost too much time.

Ted used Acronis Backup 12 bootable media, restored his Hyper-V host, booted it, and recovered his VMs from Acronis Cloud Storage. By the next morning, Tee Technologies was back in business, serving customers.

What about Bill? Bill’s day, and night, and the next day weren’t that lucky. Staring with a bare metal, he realized he needed to download a Windows installer, install the operating system, and then configure it correctly. Between not very fast downloads, innocent mistakes, missing drivers, and two OS reinstallations he finally had the system running. Then he had to configure Hyper-V, including all the complicated network settings, firewall, access rights, and so on.  It took hours and dragged well into the morning when the business should have already been running. Bill still had to download V, install it, configure it, and only then start recovery. Unfortunately, after the recovery he realized that his VMs could not talk properly to each other, and he spent more hours trying to figure out the issue.

Only around the following midnight, the system was finally running, but the company has already lost a day of operations, a day when it should have been generating revenue. It also costed Bill his bonus for the quarter.

Bill decided not to risk anymore, and convinced his boss to switch to Acronis Backup 12. Luckily, the cost of Acronis Backup 12 was nearly the same as the renewal of V’s annual maintenance.

Now, both Bill and Ted are not afraid of another Matthew.

Don’t be the old Bill – don’t put your company at risk.

Get Acronis Backup 12 and protect your Microsoft Hyper-V now.