Case studies · Managed IT
Youth Development & Community Services
hypervisor hosts under one Acronis console
VMs protected — Hyper-V and VMware combined
Mixed virtualisation — Hyper-V and VMware side by side — is where backup blind spots collect: plans get built per platform, new VMs appear between reviews, and nobody can say which machines are actually covered. Protection also had to survive contact with the working day: an initial full backup and a daily schedule that could not choke the site's business hours. And the question that decides whether any backup is worth paying for: when the moment comes, can the recovery be performed by someone who has never done it?
A dedicated tenant was stood up in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with the cloud storage region assigned to the environment's needs, admin and user access configured with security settings applied, and branding and notification preferences set to the organisation's own identity.
Protection was planned around both layers: image-based plans for each hypervisor host and for every guest VM, agents installed on all Hyper-V and VMware hosts, each host registered into the one management console — and VM auto-discovery switched on, so a machine created on any host joins its protection plan without anyone remembering to add it.
Retention followed the grandfather-father-son pattern — 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly restore points — with AES-256 encryption for data at rest and in transit, and bandwidth throttling enabled during office hours so the backup window never competed with the business day.
The initial full backup of every protected VM and hypervisor was validated end to end — data transfer, storage utilisation, completion logged — then recovery was proven, not promised: a test file-level restore, a full VM restore, and a full hypervisor restore, each verified for integrity, with recovery steps and the recovery-time objective written down.
Steady state was instrumented before handover: real-time monitoring and alerts inside the console, daily success/failure/skipped reports, immediate alerting on failed or missed backups, and a weekly summary covering storage usage, backup history and trend analysis — delivered to both the customer's IT team and ours. The engagement closed with a skills transfer: recovering a hypervisor backup and a guest-VM backup, performed by the customer's own people.
Three hypervisor hosts and fifteen virtual machines — the organisation's whole virtualised estate, across both platforms — now sit under one Acronis console on a single daily schedule with grandfather-father-son retention behind them. Recovery is proven rather than assumed: file, VM and full-hypervisor restores were each performed and verified before handover, with documented steps and a written recovery-time objective, and the customer's IT team left able to run both restores themselves. Failed or missed backups raise an immediate alert; a weekly report tracks storage, history and trends for both sides of the relationship.
Whether it’s a critical server issue or a long-term digital transformation project, our team is ready to assist. Reach out and experience ITR’s expert support that actually works.
