is Virtualising BimCloud Basic server a good idea for backup

[etvansego]

I am about to add a new PC to my business. I work mainly by self and I have a 1 casual employee.

I have a bimcloud basic licence, which from what I see doesn't give you much option for back up.

bimcloud runs on a AMD Ryzen 3600 with 64gb of ram on Windows 10 Pro. I was thinking of installing Proxmox or VMWare and virtualising Windows 10.

The main purpose of this is that I could automate back ups of snapshots, and if a big failure was to happen I could run the image on another computer and be up and running immediately.

From what I understand bimcloud doesn't really have a backup if the actual database corrupts, it takes snapshots but thats about it.

I know virtualising systems can create random issues, and so far Bimcloud has been running fine. Has anybody done this before?

[scottjm]

We  moved all our BIMservers (all basic) over to Virtual Machines over 12months ago, running off an actual rack mounted server hypervisor.  We had about 6 different servers for different versions across our two offices, so it definitely helped simplify things for us. 

After a bit of initial teething it all seems to be running great now and as far as I can see we are getting the same performance as before. 

My biggest recommendation is to max out the virtual resources, RAM and CPU as much as you can for the VM, this is where we suffered some testing issues. 

Also I would do some testing about what happens when you restore a snapshot that created was mid way through daily usage. I am yet to test this myself but heard reports that for others that it is best to actually have the BIMCloud service paused while the snapshot is created to prevent possible corruption.  

Before we moved our BIMCloud servers over to VMs we were running them of machines with 4 SSD drives in RAID to give us additional read/write performance and data protection security. I would suggest a RAID setup even for the machine running the VM. 

The other consideration is how and where you are going to store the VM snapshots. If they are saved to the same machine the VM is running on that kind of defeats data security logic if that machine goes down, how do you get the backups off it quickly? You may want to investigate an enterprise grade backup platform like VEEAM and store the snapshot backups on a NAS.