Hyper-v and Windows Server Backup

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Hurin

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Howdy All,

Work-around for restoring individual virtual machines via Windows Server Backup?

Before I burn several days testing. . . anyone have any feedback here?

We've got two Hyper-v servers. I don't want to spend $2-3k on a corporate backup solution. Our budget is somewhat tight.

Windows Server Backup built-into Windows Server 2008 R2 will back up each virtual machine via the vss writer. However, there's no way to restore individual virtual machines. You have to restore the whole hyper-v server just to restore one machine.

However, windows backup works by creating vhds. wouldn't a valid work-around be to use the built-in backup. . . and if you need to restore an individual restore, just mount the vhd of the server's backed up drive, and then go into that to get the vhd's you need for the individual virtual machine. . . shut down that virtual machine. . . replace its vhds. . . and restart?

I suspect it's more complicated than that. . . hence the need for testing. But I thought I'd ask here before wasting time on something that is known to be a bad idea from the get-go.

(we'll be backing up to disk across the network, and then archiving to tape once per week, I think).
 
nitrobass24 said:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958662
Click to expand...
Well, thanks. But that doesn't answer my question in any way. That's just instructions for enabling the vss write for hyper-v (which I've already done). My question was about working around the inability to restore individual virtual machines.

Please note from the document you linked:
Note All volumes that host files for the virtual machine will be restored. Individual virtual machines cannot be restored by using Windows Server Backup.
​
So, again, the issue is working around that limitation.
 
Ok i was confused. I thought you were just trying to figure out how to enable the Server Backups.

Unfortunately there are not any great thrid party tools out there like there is for vmware.
There are really two options:
Free: Restore the entire parent partition to a test environment or restore VM, export the VM you want to restore and import it into your production environment. Yes this takes a little bit longer but it is free :)
The other option is to use DPM2010.
 
Hmmmm, never really considered DPM2010. But I'm looking at it now and it is promising. I can get it for cheap too (volume licensing). The only problem is that my Hyper-v servers are not in a domain at the moment. Been wanting to build a new AD domain from scratch before I join them to it (wanna jettison the old one).

If you have any direct experience with DPM2010. . . I have a couple linux LAMP servers in production. They each are about 40GB in size. According to MS, since they don't support VSS they'll be put in a "paused" state while being backed up. Does DPM2010 at least allow me to opt out of backing them up in this fashion? With just the built-in Window Server Backup, there's no way to select which v-machines get backed up. I hope there is such a way in DPM2010 so they will be just left alone and not paused while the backup job is running (and then I'll worry about backing up those linux machines in some other fashion).

Thanks!

Edit: NM, DPM2010 really seems to be disk-based with occasional archive to tape. Building a DPM server with enough (reliable) capacity to back up all of our stuff regularly is currently beyond our means. We have about 5TB with as much as 5TB more coming soon. DPM wants 1.5xtotal-protected-data. So. . . 15TB array. Even with 3TB drives, we'd need too many. And Raid5 wouldn't be safe with that many possibly bad sectors around. Would need at least Raid6. So, I guess I'm headed back to looking at Arcserve or something like that which will write directly to tape.
 
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Backup exec with the hyper-v agent would be ideal then. It works really well.
 
The more I look at DPM, the more i like it. I might just re-think this whole thing and try to convince myself to go with three or four 3TB Hitachi drives ($200 each) at the outset. Since this is the backup server, and it'll be archiving to tape, it wouldn't be the end of the world if one of those drives fails. After all, the original servers should be up. And if the original servers, and the backup server fails, there's always tape. If all three fail. . . well, I'll be quitting anyways. Who needs the stress. =)
 
That seems like a pretty cool solutions and very reasonable pricing.

Thanks for sharing :)
 
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