Hyper-V Backup by Vembu BDR- A Short Intro

Need for Vembu BDR’s Hyper-V Backup

Backing up a VM running on Microsoft hypervisor environment typically is more expensive and difficult to manage. Vembu fills a purpose here to be the best of breed technology in providing a low cost and manageable solution.

Work Flow:

During initial full backup from host machine, Microsoft VSS services initiates the snapshot in the configured guest machine through “HyperV integration services”. Once the snapshot completes, Vembu BDR will read VHD files and configuration files of the guest machine and transfer the data to the backup server.

Once a full backup completes, Vembu BDR CBT driver starts tracking VHD files associated with the guest machine. All changes in VHD files are efficiently tracked by the driver. When a incremental is scheduled the block level changes alone will get backed up. This improves the incremental performance and consistency of backup.

Required Environment:

Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 2012 R2 Hypervisor Environment.

Pre Backup Checklist:

To achieve zero downtime live backups of guest machines, you need the following conditions met:

• The VM guest needs to have integration services installed, enabled, and running (COM system application service, distributed transaction coordinator service, and volume shadow copy service). Also review the VM settings in Hyper-V and ensure that the ‘backup’ option needs to be checked.
• All disks involved need to be formatted with NTFS, including the disks within the VM.
• The volume shadow copy service and related VSS services needed to be enabled and running.
• The shadow copy storage space for each drive must be available to HyperV VSS writer and must be located in the same volume. For instance, the storage space for drive C: needs to be on drive C: itself, and so on.

Use the VSSADMIN command from the command line to check the settings. (Use: vssadmin list shadowstorage / vssadmin resize shadowstorage)

• Ensure the VMs are partitioned using ‘basic disk’ formatting. Currently Hyper-V does not support live backup for VMs formatted using dynamic disk partitioning or GPT.
• Ensure you have at least 20% space available on each drive involved, such as the drive on the host and the VM’s main system drive.

Steps to configure:

Install Vembu BDR client in your HyperV host machine and login into client web console.

• Goto Backup -> click on MS HyperV.

• This will list the guest machines available in the host. Choose the machine you wish to configure:

Progress will be viewable as below:

Steps to Restore:

To restore the backup:

• click on “Proceed” with recovery option icon in the list backups page from the backup server web console.

•  Choose any one of following restore options: Instant-Boot or Download Image file.

•  By Choosing instant boot, you can directly boot the Guest OS from the backup server machine.

• By choosing download image file, you can download as VHD/VMDK/RAW format.

To learn more about Vembu BDR, do try experimenting with our downloads and note that BDR is available free for a 30 days trial period.

If you have more queries, drop your mail to vembu-sales@vembu.com