Hyper-V Backup and Recovery: Protect your Hyper-V VMs with BDRSuite. Start 30-day Free Trial today!
Table of Contents
- What is Hyper-V
- How to Backup Hyper-V Virtual Machines
- Microsoft’s Backup for VMs
- Third-party backup for Hyper-V virtual machines
- BDRSuite for Hyper-V
- BDRsuite for Hyper-V – Feature Highlights
What is Hyper-V
In today’s fast-paced world, data is one of the most valuable assets for any organization. With businesses relying heavily on virtual environments to manage workloads, ensuring data protection has become more critical than ever. This is where Hyper-V, Microsoft’s virtualization technology, comes into play.
Hyper-V is a powerful virtualization technology developed by Microsoft that enables users to create and manage virtual machines on a single physical server. With Hyper-V, you can run multiple operating systems and applications on isolated virtual environments, without having to dedicate a separate physical machine for each one. This not only saves time and resources but also provides increased flexibility and scalability for managing workloads across multiple platforms. Additionally, Hyper-V offers advanced security features to protect your virtualized environments, ensuring optimal performance and reliability.
With great power comes great responsibility, and it is essential to have a reliable backup strategy in place to safeguard your data. In this blog post, we will explore the different options for backing up your Hyper-V virtual machines, so you can ensure that your data is secure and easily recoverable, whenever you need it.
With BDRSuite, you have the option to backup your Hyper-V virtual machines, with the added benefit of upto 10 VMs being free of charge. To find out more about this feature, click here, and take advantage of the free trial by downloading it today.
How to Backup Hyper-V Virtual Machines
If you’re running virtual machines in your organization, you are more likely to be using VMware or Hyper-V. With the number of Hyper-V users increasing rapidly, here are a few tips for you to get started in data protection.
Backing up your Hyper-V virtual machines is the best preventive measure you can put up against data threats. It gives you the scope to roll back in time to restore your system to a particular point before the threat wiped out your data.
So, what options do we have?
- The free-yet-inefficient way: You manually take the VM’s files to another location
- Create Checkpoints
- Export the Virtual Machine
- It’s-native-and-does-the-job way: You use Microsoft’s own backups
- The best way: Leverage a third-party backup tool
1. Stop-Copy-Transfer (Manual backups)
Your aim is to have a copy of your virtual machine’s files like hardware configuration, operating system, saved-state files, virtual hard disks, and network configuration files to another site.
There are two ways to do this: Hot and Cold
Hot and Cold backup:
To expand, Cold Backup involves stopping the virtual machine and copying the files.
Although you can script these actions, you will suffer a downtime that feels like forever. When it comes to critical machines that need continuous uptime, this is the least efficient mode of backups.
The good thing is that it doesn’t cost you anything. But, as previously said, downtime costs you indirectly.
It makes you wonder, how do I backup my VMs without interrupting operations? Or in other words, how do I perform Hot Backup?
You can perform using Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).
The Volume Shadow Copy Service Way
If your guest OS is Windows, you can take the VSS way of backing up your VMs.
This can be done in two ways:
- a. Saved State Method – The virtual machine is basically put into a Saved State before the snapshot processing happens.
b. Child VM Snapshot method – VSS inside the child VM can be utilized for backup. Backup Integration Service should be installed in the child VM. The VSS Requestor and VSS Writer coordinate to get a stable image of the VM.
BDRSuite offers comprehensive Hyper-V VM backup and recovery options
2. Create Checkpoints
Hyper-V Checkpoint allows you to create a point-in-time snap of your virtual machine and gives the ability to roll back to the previous state quickly and easily.
Never treat Checkpoints as Backups
Checkpoints are stored on the Hyper-V host storage. That means, If you lose storage that contains the Hyper-V virtual machine hard disk files, then the checkpoints will be lost as well.
Backups of Hyper-V virtual machines using any third-party tool allows you to store the data in a way that has no reliance on Hyper-V infrastructure. This allows you to restore the Hyper-V virtual machines in a disaster recovery scenario whereas Checkpoints don’t allow it. That’s why you should not rely on Checkpoints for backups.
Know more on How to use Hyper-V Virtual Machines Checkpoints
3. Export the Virtual Machine
Exporting a VM involves creating a copy of VM configuration files, VHD files, and VM snapshots in another location. The export of a VM can be done either when the VM is in running state or stopped state.
The exported Hyper-V VM files can be imported into the same hyper-v host or a new host and the virtual machine can be created.
Know more about How to Export and Import Hyper-V Virtual Machines.
Best way to backup Hyper-V virtual machines – Hyper-V host-level backups
Virtual machines contain units that have their hardware configuration, OS and services.
When backing up these virtual machines, you can back up each one of them as if it were a separate machine or backup all the virtual machines at once directly from the host.
But imagine backing up 10 – 15 VMs manually and individually. It takes a toll on your machine’s I/O operations and on your sanity.
There’s a simpler alternative – Host-level backup. Here, you back up all the virtual machines directly from the host without installing any agents inside the virtual machine.
Keep your virtual machines secure with BDRSuite’s Hyper-V VM backup capabilitie
4. Microsoft’s Backup for VMs
Microsoft has the System Center Data Protection Manager to backup the virtual machine’s data from the host level. DPM uses block-based synchronization to take a copy of the VM. Using Hyper-V APIs, the DPM determines whether the VMs support VSS. If they do, then the Child VM method is used to take the backup and if not, the machine is just stopped to take a snapshot.
5. Third-party backup for Hyper-V virtual machines
We’re now at a point in virtualization, where you may be using multiple hypervisors in your environment. A native backup solution for Microsoft Hyper-V doesn’t cut it when you have a mixed environment. You may also look for extensive reporting, flexible scheduling, and disaster recovery options.
When you are looking for so much more than what Microsoft’s native backup offers, it is best for you to go for a third-party tool like BDRSuite.
BDRSuite is a one-stop solution for the Backup & DR needs of diverse IT environments that include VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers and workstations – Windows, Linux, Mac, AWS EC2 instances, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
BDRSuite for Hyper-V
BDRSuite for Hyper-V is a Secure, Scalable, and Reliable Backup & DR solution for Microsoft Hyper-V VMs. With BDRSuite for Hyper-V, you can back up all the virtual machines in your Hyper-V servers without installing an agent on each VM.
BDRsuite for Hyper-V – Feature Highlights
- Agentless VM Backup & Replication for Hyper-V Standalone Hosts and Cluster Servers
- Ensure RPO, RTO < 15 minutes
- Backup copy feature to store data both in on-premise and cloud
- Application-aware backups with Log Truncation
- Resilient Change Tracking (RCT) based incremental backups
- Instant Boot VM with Live Migration
- Instant file & application-item level recovery
- Instantly restore individual files and folders without restoring the entire VMs
- Granular restore the application items such as Microsoft Active Directory, SQL, Exchange, and SharePoint without restoring the complete image
- Supports Hyper-V Cluster, CSV, S2D an SMB share
- Automated Backup Verification to verify the recoverability of the backup
- Supports Cross-Hypervisor migration (V2V)
- VM replication to replicate your Hyper-V VMs from one host to another
- Centralized Monitoring tool and License Management portal
- Built-in AES 256-bit Encryption for backup data security
- Built-in Compression & Deduplication for efficient use of backup storage
- Offsite Replication for disaster recovery
These features allow extremely efficient and effective data protection for your Hyper-V environment.
With BDRSuite for Hyper-V, you can back up and protect Unlimited Hyper-V VMs. BDRSuite also offers BDRSuite for Hyper-V -Free edition with which you will be able to backup unlimited VMS for zero cost. This free edition includes Full-feature for up to 10 VMs and limited features for the rest of the VMs.
To learn more about BDRSuite for Hyper-V click here
Download BDRSuite – Free Edition and try it for yourself. Experience modern data protection for your environment.
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To finish this article, please read this article on Hyper-V configuration Best Practices written by Brandon Lee.
You can also follow and share our Hyper-V series for Beginners below:
Beginners’ Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V: Overview of Hyper-V Part 1
Beginners’ Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V: How to Install Microsoft Hyper-V Using Server Manager – Part 2
Beginners’ Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V: How to Install Microsoft Hyper-V with PowerShell – Part 3
Latest in the series
Beginners’ Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V: How to run IIS in Docker Container – Part 38
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