Best practices for backing up VM's with Hyper-V

[jadams]

I have a few in production VM's. Most backup programs cant backup the actual VM because all the files associated with the VM are already in use. So basically you cant really do a 1:1 copy if the VM is running. Brining it down isnt always an option.

How do you back up your VM's?

 

[Eickst]

You can backup the vhd using VSS. Won't work with dynamically expanding disks, only fixed size disks.

 

[xenios]

Most popular backup solutions support VSS. If you want to do file level restores for files within a VM the only product that i know will do that off the top of my head is system center data protection manager with hyper-v r2. There are probably a few others though.