Adventures with Hyper-V and Backup

re: Adventures with Hyper-V and Backup

Jason — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 09:30:01 GMT

i use the free version from altaro for my home setup www.altaro.com/hyper-v-backup

doesnt have the full functionality that you might need though more than enough for home and my test lab..

there are a few backup/export scripts out there too that help...just search for them

re: Adventures with Hyper-V and Backup

Phillip Windell [MVP - Forefront] — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 18:09:57 GMT

[Written based off of reading the original article, not considering other comments]

It is because of the new disk configuration (and different accompanying Disk Controller Hardware) that causes the restore to fail. Doing this with with Windows Server Backup is really no different than imaging the whole thing with something like Ghost and then applying the image to the new Drive Setup and expecting it to boot up.

You need to backup all the VMs and any other needed material. Then Load the OS clean from scratch on the new Drive Setup,...then restore all the VM and the material. Basically this is the same thing as dealing with a failed machine when you are forced to restore on to Dissimilar Hardware (which just is another way of saying that you can not restore). In fact the Drive Controllers and Drive Arrangement is the primary thing that causes hardware to be considered "dissimilar" or "incompatible".

phillip.windell@wandtv.com

phillip.windell@live.com

re: Adventures with Hyper-V and Backup

Benjamin Armstrong — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:15:41 GMT

Janson -

Thanks for the pointer!

Ronnie Isherwood -

disk2vhd uses VSS to create the snapshot - so it actually is pretty much the same thing under the covers.

Kurt -

Thanks for the feedback.

Mike -

No, VMM needs to have a domain controller.

Cheers,

Ben

re: Adventures with Hyper-V and Backup

Joe — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:58:11 GMT

I too had the same concern as you about a single point of failure. To solve this problem I just added a hard disk and enabled a software RAID-1 mirror for the system volumes. It's not exactly what you were trying to do, but I thought it might be helpful for others to know that this is possible and requires no downtime or backups. You can even do it through the command line on Hyper-V Server using Diskpart. I plan to blog about my experience installing and configuring Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 in the next couple of days and this set of actions will be included.

re: Adventures with Hyper-V and Backup

Mike — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:26:47 GMT

Is there ANY way to get VMM to run on a Workgroup only environment? I don't have a domain, only workgroups but I want to use the tools that VMM has. How can I do this.

Thanks,

Mike

re: Adventures with Hyper-V and Backup

Jake — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:50:01 GMT

Hello Ben. It's sad to hear you have such a poor setup. My Simple Beyond TV configuration has 4 drives with mixed RAID 0 and 1 drives.

Mirroring your two drives would do zero for performance on your system. Just help with the safety/reliability of your boot OS.

Most standard practices generally have the server OS on one pair of mirrored drives and then your data or VMs on mirrored pairs of drives depending on the load. In larger environments you might have multiple pairs of drives. In your "home" situation a simple setup of 4 drives in a RAID 1+0 configuration would solve the speed and security issue, but you obviously have to have a lot of drives. They're so cheap who doesn't have quite a few.

Also, unless you want ultimate speed from something like a Velociraptor, pairs of laptop 2.5" drives running 7200rpms work very well. They cost a bit more per GB, but they have less heat, noise and are more durable.

Regarding your backup, I still use GHOST, more from a USB key than a floppy, but it's extremely fast and would copy over your drives while changing to the larger capacity at the same time. I know you got to highlight the feature fix for this article, it's just not what I do at my company. NTBACKUP also still works very well inside of the VM to a network drive.

re: Adventures with Hyper-V and Backup

hidden object games — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:37:33 GMT

I have to agree with Doug with regards to creating reliable backups. My experience with it is also nearly impossible.

re: Adventures with Hyper-V and Backup

Kurt — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:44:02 GMT

To offer some contrasting perspective to these comments, I would like to say that I am running a production Hyper-V environment with a fully virtualized corporate server infrastructure. Many of the VMs have undergone P2V migration, restoration from backup, or OS upgrades – and they continue to work as expected. I use DPM for more granular backups during the week and WSB for full images of the Hyper-V hosts + VMs on the weekend. And I have found this to be the most stable, complete, and efficient backup system I’ve ever encountered, though it took a while to work out the bugs. More to the point, I feel safer than ever that I will be able to revert or recover when necessary, and IT management is much easier. So thanks MS, and in particular, thank you Ben for all the great virtualization work you have done over the years – it is inspiring to me, and it keeps getting better with every release!

I like watching the Hyper-V manager when the backups run. In the status column it shows saving/restoring for VMs that hibernate, or “Creating VSS snapshot set…succeeded!” for those with full integration services enabled. This gives me a warm, secure feeling inside.

That being said, I do think the VSS infrastructure can be dramatically enhanced and improved to address the issues described in this post (I’ve dealt with many of them myself), but I have faith that the developers will get there in time, as more R&D investments are made in the technology. A big complaint I have is that initially MS did not implement backing-up certain things with WSB. Exchange 2007 didn’t get it until SP2. DPM 2007 can’t use WSB to make a full image of itself (system volume only, not the replicas). And as for Hyper-V, I would have thought the registry key enabler for WSB would have been added automatically in 2008 R2, and was surprised it wasn’t.

In short, if it is a MS product, WSB (or its future incarnation) should be able to back it up natively with VSS, right out of the box…period! Personally, I think lack of support for certain applications was a deliberate attempt to push DPM on enterprise customers. But now I use both technologies in tandem, and am pleased with the level of protection this combination offers. Full images are vital to have in a crunch, plus DPM incremental grabs for good measure.

re: Adventures with Hyper-V and Backup

JD — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:57:10 GMT

Ben,

Great time to post this. I was actually thinking about how I want to back up my Hyper-V R2 VMs. Since I have JBOD with VMs on them so i could have as many spindles as possible I have the same single point of failure as you.

I'm thinking about getting a large external USB drive and just let it back up to there every other day or so. Only down side after reading the KB article is you can only do a whole drive not individual VMs.

re: Adventures with Hyper-V and Backup

Ronnie Isherwood — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:24:55 GMT

Ben,

as an interim and additional saftey measure for your "eggs in one disk" problem:

Grab a copy using disk2vhd, it should still let you watch tv while you run it and you then you will have hedged your bets with both a backup to restore and a vhd file to play with.

If you get time you could push for disk2vhd2disk.

Good luck