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Anguel's avatar
Anguel
Level 4
11 years ago

SSR 2013: Host-level Hyper-V backups in Win Server 2012 R2

Hi!

I am experimenting with Symantec System Recovery 2013 and host-level Hyper-V VM backups in Windows Server 2012 R2.

My observations are as follows:

1. SSR is capable of doing hot Hyper-V backups. In this case Hyper-V creates intermediate snapshots (checkpoints / avhdx) during the backup that are auto-merged into the VM being backed up after the backup. Unfortunately, the snapshots stay in the iv2i backup files and I am not sure how to handle them after the restore of the VM from the backup.

2. I tried to run a pre-backup script in SSR that shuts down the VM in order to perform a cold backup of the VM. After the backup I run a post-backup script in SSR to restart the VM. This works ok so far but Hyper-V still creates the snaptshots (checkpoints / avhdx) I described above although the VM is shutdown at the time of backup. Is this behavior expected?

3. I tried to turn off the "backup volume snapshot" integration service for the particular VM through the Hyper-V Manager. According to the docs this should force Hyper-V to move the VM into saved state and perform a cold backup instead of a hot backup. Unfortunately, this does not change anything. The VM continues to run (instead of stopping) and the execution flow is the same as described in 1. Does SSR somehow ignore the Hyper-V settings?

Thanks in advance.

Anguel

Backing Up
Backup and Recovery
SSR 2013
System Recovery
Virtualization
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • Anguel's avatar
    Anguel
    Level 4
    11 years ago

    Thanks Markus,

    I also noticed that after the restore the VM has the temporary AVHDX hard disks attached instead of the original VHDX disks, i.e. if my VM has a virtual harddisk that was test.vhdx after restore it is test_SOME_LONG_ID.avhdx (although the original test.vhdx is still there. I expect that this is probably due to the fact that during backup Hyper-V redirects its writes to that temporary avhdx and after backup SSR does not "fix" this.

    BTW: I am also running SSR inside the VM to get granular file-level backups. But that should not be important. Or does SSR make use of it's own VSS manager instead of Microsoft's VSS manager?

    Anguel

  • Markus_Koestler's avatar
    Markus_Koestler
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    At least under W2K3 it has its own VSS provider. But vssadmin list writers should show in the VM.

  • criley's avatar
    criley
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    Anguel,

    1. SSR is capable of doing hot Hyper-V backups. In this case Hyper-V creates intermediate snapshots (checkpoints / avhdx) during the backup that are auto-merged into the VM being backed up after the backup. Unfortunately, the snapshots stay in the iv2i backup files and I am not sure how to handle them after the restore of the VM from the backup.

    I'm not sure I understand the problem here. What exactly is the problem you mention regarding the incremental (iv2i) backups?

  • Anguel's avatar
    Anguel
    Level 4
    11 years ago

    My question is actually the following:

    When I perform a host-level backup of Hyper-V (it does not matter if my VM is shutdown or running at the time of backup) in the backup archive I always get the original virtual disk, e.g. MYDISK.vhdx and an additional MYDISK_SOME_LONG_ID.avhdx temporary snapshot.

    Probably this is all related to:

    http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=15759

    So on restore the VM is actually pointing to that *.avhdx snapshot instead of the original *.vhdx. So how should I proceed? Probably I should I just discard the *.avhdx because it may contain inconsistent data? This would mean that I would have to manually make the VM to point back to the *.vhdx files instead of the *.avhdx files. I don't see any explanations in the SSR docs so customers have to guess...

    Anguel

     

  • criley's avatar
    criley
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    Let me check on this and get back to you.

    I'm going to be out of office for a few days so may not be able to get back to you until sometime next week.

  • Anguel's avatar
    Anguel
    Level 4
    11 years ago

    Thank you in advance Chris!

    BTW: I have now ordered 2 server licenses and 15 workstation licenses.

    Best regards,

    Anguel

  • criley's avatar
    criley
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    Sorry for the delay on this.

    I have received a response on this and need to verify one of two things. I should be able to provide an update within a day or two.