From my experience, most docking stations work seamlessly plug and play, even cheaper ones. There used to be a need for a manual DisplayLink driver update for Win 10 but not anymore.

I have to deal with this from time to time. Usually, some crappy legacy client-server LOB apps. The workloads are normally so tiny and simple that suggesting server hardware for them is a waste of money. Some of their vendors don't even add server O/Ses in the technical requirements. Most small shops don't even have enough physical space to run server hardware properly let alone willing to spend a few grand on a server, MS licencing and the labour to set it all up for them.

I remember the advice @Obsolesce gave the other day, just buy the least expensive Server Essentials licence and stick it on a Win 10 box where the app runs. This won't help anyone with more than 25 users or devices, though

HA doesn't come cheap most of times.

@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

I've just installed on bare metal, but now I've run into an issue where backup tape jobs are not supported in my version of Veeam. I can backup files, but not VM's unless I upgrade to "enterprise" veeam

Why wouldn't you simply select the existing Veeam backup folders/files and archive them to tape? Here is an excerpt from the official Veeam guide: "When a backup to tape job runs, it does not create new backups: it locates already existing backups and copies them from backup repository to tape. You need to set the source of the tape job: jobs and/or backup repositories."

@Donahue You're right. I saw this here: https://forums.starwindsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=4098 Free VSAN with a 30-day trial Starwind management console might be sufficient but this will cost your Hyper-V host an extra Server Standard OSE licence unless you're using Datacenter with it.

EditA cheap second-hand physical Windows server with the directly attached tape drive is another alternative as others here already suggested. I have one running for offsite Veeam tape backups of vSphere VMs.

Saw your other reply. I'd simply run Veeam Console bare-metal on that server with the attached tape drive since you're not using it for anything else. It's the best practice too. Better have a Veeam backup target on another host or NAS box too.

Hey @Donahue. Have you looked at free Starwind Tape Redirector by any chance? It basically allows you to present a tape drive attached to the host as an ISCSI LUN to your Veeam B&R's Windows Server VM so the backup software would see it directly installed. Wouldn't this solve your problem?

Normally, I start with 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM for GUI-enabled Windows guests and 2 vCPUs with 2 GB RAM if they're GUI-less. Lots of trivial AD workloads like DC, DHCP, DNS, NPS etc. run fine with 1 vCPU but I found assigning one extra virtual CPU does make updates running somewhat faster. In most cases in my experience where VM CPU usage jumped above 75%, the spinning rust was the culprit, especially if a SAN was in use, it had nothing to do with the actual host's CPU power.

Normally, you don't want any IP phones with 100 Mbit/s PC ports to avoid network bottlenecks. I've seen issues with duplex mismatches with them too.

Most Tx and Rx errors on switch ports were usually related to poorly terminated cabling in my experience, very rarely to misconfigured or faulty interfaces. Reset counters as already suggested by @dafyre at both ends and see if the numbers grow up quickly again.

@scottalanmiller said in MSP Backup Product - Local Storage:

@taurex said in MSP Backup Product - Local Storage:

@CCWTech You'd likely need something that's known as Backup as a Service (BaaS) app. You might have to rely only on agent-based backups for VMs without a backup appliance. I believe the main reason behind backup appliances/servers is agentless VM backups.

BaaS essentially always means that it is going to cloud. If it isn't, it's hard to call it a service as you are doing most of it and there isn't any back up service.

Appliances don't imply agentless, I'm sure some appliance does that. But the big appliance players almost all do agent and agentless, and some are only one or the other. The biggest ones, like Datto and Unitrends, do agents for sure... one exclusively, one optionally. And a Veeam based appliance will do either, too.

Thanks for pointing that out, Scott. I stand corrected. I'm quite interested myself if there's a backup solution out there with a hosted central management console. Although, if it's a Linux based appliance that can manage backups of Windows-based VMs, I'd check it out too. Veeam is excellent but I find it too Windows-centric. No Linux-based central management, proxies have to be Windows either etc.