I am stil a little befuddled by the fact you cannot virtual boot a backup desktop image. Literally every product on the market that does this for desktops (I've given 4 examples of leading products below) sell this as a feature. Are you saying it is all a scam, considering these are desktop backup products? Or that each should have an asterisk (none of which does) that says "this feature only available if you separately get a virtual license for the machine you are backing up"?

Not that I do not believe this group (or of course the source, @chris), but it just seems like maybe I'm not explaining myself properly. I now consider this group like my wife. never wrong.

Disaster Recovery – Recover your entire PC in minutes to the same location, to dissimilar hardware, or to a virtual desktop.
Quickly restore data locally or remotely. In the event of hardware failure or natural disaster, recover an entire PC in minutes
with Acronis’ fast bare-metal restore.

Restore a system to the same or different hardware or to virtual environments with StorageCraft Recovery Environment and HIR
Rapidly boot a backup image as a virtual machine (temporary system failover) with VirtualBoot

If the OS installed on the computer fails to start for some reason, you can boot
the OS from the recovery image. Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE lets you create a
bootable recovery image of your computer on different kinds of media,

Virtual Image Boot (Technology Preview)
The ability to directly convert a Macrium System Image file into a running VM. Provides instant boot of failed systems for business continuity.

@scottalanmiller said:

OEM Server licenses are not something you would ever buy or talk about, they simply should not exist. When you talk server licensing, no one means OEM. It's a standard best practice to never have OEM servers and no serious business does.

That is definitely something I agree with.

@scottalanmiller said:

Banking on it, though, would be very foolish.

That's why I am here. To not look foolish!

@scottalanmiller said:

Of course, server licenses are totally mobile. Everyone does that all of the time. If you couldn't, you couldn't have things like VMware or HyperV clusters or load balancing or failover.

I was under the impression that OEM server licenses were not mobile.

@Chris said:

@BRRABill what I posted was for Windows desktop OS, not server.

What are the rules for a server OS?

For OEM licenses, and also spinning up a VM for disaster recovery purposes. Are you saying that is allowed?

Thanks!

@scottalanmiller said:

Using enterprise server backup software, which on its own is a good thing but huge overkill for desktops, is leading you towards odd thinking as well. Those vendors had no intention of their products being used for backing up desktops. Sure you can, it works and they are happy to support that but fundamentally no thought is put into getting that working because it's not an intended or assumed use case. So all of their processes and features are designed around the intention of there being server licenses involved.

But server licenses have the same issue, no? Can you move a server open license from one machine to another? I know you can't do it with OEM.

Most of my thinking has been on the server level.

I just don't get the concept of having to buy a whole new server license if my motherboard dies. I guess that's what makes Hyper-V such an attractive option.

And I was certainly told that you can call Microsoft and explain the situation and often they will reissue the license, which is in direct contradiction to what @Chris has said.

@Chris said:

LMK what additional questions you have.

So for a BMR, in the case of open license, it's not an issue because you can just reassign the license, right? But in the case of an OEM license, is it true that in the case of total failure Microsoft will allow you to reinstall to new hardware? Is that true?

And in the case of a VM. You are saying that if I want to spin up a copy of my image just to make sure it is backing up properly and accessible, I need an additional license for that?

@scottalanmiller said:

As this client is only five PCs, I have a suspicion that you are running OEM copies of Windows and have not gotten them a volume license deal? This could be a problem. Not only would you be lacking VDI licensing, if this is the case, but you would have unlicensed OSes going to the DR site as well.

That a lesson I did learn recently. While apparently MS can be flexible sometimes with OEM licensing, it is much easier to have volume licensing.

@scottalanmiller said:

As this client is only five PCs, I have a suspicion that you are running OEM copies of Windows and have not gotten them a volume license deal? This could be a problem. Not only would you be lacking VDI licensing, if this is the case, but you would have unlicensed OSes going to the DR site as well.

Yeah this has branched into another topic, really.

The VDI licensing question is really only in relation to all the products on the market that allow you to spin up VMs for disaster recovery.

So I guess the question for @chris is:

What are the MS rules when it comes to disaster recovery? Again, we are only talking about using a BMR (which also requires activation) or a VM in a disaster recovery scenario.

It would probably be good to know both about server and desktop OSes as both can be backed up using these products.

i guess since you are only running it for a few seconds, they consider it a gray area. I don't know.

I didn't find much in Google other than ShadowProtect has nothing to do with licensing.

Does this forum have product people we can ask? That would be an interesting one to ask.

@scottalanmiller said:

Oh sure, BMR they will likely let you slide. But that's not what we were discussing The strategy that you had that I was talking about is a VDI strategy. If you drop the VDI strategy and go to a BMR one, sure the VDI issues will not apply.

One of the selling points of these systems is being able to spin up a virtual copy of your machine at any time. Datto even spins one up every night to provide a screenshot that it is indeed booting. I got the impresion you were thining that counted as VDI. It does not?

@scottalanmiller said:

Are you sure that you've heard this referenced to VDI / desktop OSes and not just to servers (where VDI does not exist.)

It was actually in reference to a BMR. I'll have to try to virtually boot a desktop I have backed up and see what happens. That'll be for another day.

@scottalanmiller said:

But yes, MS is not going to try to hold you up. They literally run for that licensing money so they will do everything that they can to help.

I was under the impression they let it slide in disaster recovery scenarios, but I am not 100% sure about that. I'm talking about BMR, not VDI. You're only using it until your get the actual server/desktop restored.

@scottalanmiller said:

Well okay, this has its limitations. Only a few specific services offer this, most do not. This adds a lot of cost, of course. And you need to check to see if VDI is covered, because as desktops these are not covered by any normal licensing and you will need VDI licensing both for spinning up the VMs and for any devices that will be used to connect to them. VDI isn't a simple process. My guess is that those vendors (Datto actually uses ShadowProtect so that's the same solution twice more or less) leave all licensing liability up to you, which sucks as that is super expensive.

Yeah in my testing of this, licensing becomes an issue. I have not had to officially do it yet (I worked around it with an OEM key workaround in testing) but am assured MS will help in a disaster recovery scenario.

You are right it's basically the same solution, twice. Though it's interesting that they are pretty different. Nice technology, though.

@scottalanmiller said:

What is sent TO the cloud is of minor concern. The issue is how do you restore quickly if you have to pull down a massive image of your systems instead of only the data?

Ah, I see what you are getting at.

Well, the only time you would need something like that would be in the case of a total catastrophe locally. (Or everything gets stolen.) I'd hope the solution includes some sort of way to spin up the image in the cloud. Again, like a Datto or the premium service ShadowProtect offers.

But I think what you are saying is, the risk/reward versus price to a 5-PC SMB just isn't worth it.

One of the options I had thought about (and someone mentioned) was one of these NAS devices that can replicate itself. I had been looking at the Synology which someone mentioned.

You have ShadowProtect (or Veeam) running the backups to the NAS on-site, which replicates, say, to my office (or the owner's home or whatever) so we could just grab that and bring it over.

BTW: this is only my second posting, but this is really like live chatting with a bunch of my close IT buddies. Awesome!

@scottalanmiller said:

When going to cloud, I would say that it is generally quite impractical unless, maybe if you have Gigabit connections like Google Fiber.

Really just for the initial seeding, or if the user has really big files. On our servers (and probably the PCs of people in a 5 PC or less office) the incrementals that are sent to the cloud are pretty small.

Most services have initial seeding options, some (such as Datto) for free.

We didn't use that on our servers. It took a day or so but the initial upload went fine. But we have 75/75 FIOS. I guess not everyone is lucky to have that.

@scottalanmiller said:
that this would not be generally considered the best even for situations where data is stored locally.

You mean in terms of ease-of-use for the end user? Yeah, I agree with that.