Hello all
I am making a blog post after a long time but now onwards I will be regular!
We keep getting queries on best practices/ways to protect Hyper-V VMs with SSR, so here is some useful information.
Two different Methods/strategies could be employed to protect virtual machines on Windows Server with Hyper-V role enabled environment:
Method 1: Host level backup
[Please note that for the backups to be crash consistent snapshot integration services should be installed in the guest machine.]
- Install Symantec System Recovery on the Windows Server with Hyper-V role enabled
- Take host backup. During backup please select OS volume and all related drives for backup. If OS volume and related drives are not backed up then user will not be able to restore.
As shown in screenshot below, all drives will be listed as related drives when Hyper-V role is enabled.
In case of disaster, user will need to boot in to SRD and restore the setup from the backup done earlier. The OS volume and all the drives will need to be restored.
Please note that in the host level backup method, you won’t have granular restore functionality from inside the guests. To have granular restore functionality inside the guests SSR needs to be installed in the Guest VM.
However, users may just want to restore specific VMs and also avoid the need to restore the complete setup. This would ensure the backups and restores are faster. In such instances use method 2 of backing up individual VMs.
Method 2: VM level backup:
- If you want to backup specific VM then install SSR on that virtual machine and take backups.
- This way in case of VM failure the VM backup could be used for restoring the virtual machine back.
Thanks and regards
-Mahesh
