You might be an IT admin of a small business industry who handles a heavily resourced, Hyper-V environment with lets say 55 VMs installed. It is your primary job to make sure that the user data is backed up periodically without any hitches. Vembu BDR takes over the ownership and alerts users with error messages whenever there is a problem backing up.
The best way to backup a VM in Hyper-V is at the host-level where VSS is used to make shadow-copies of user data before backing up so that data consistency is maintained. But there are certain basic measures that an IT admin must ensure to achieve 100% success in backups. They are:
Adequate disk space:
For a backup process to commence successfully, VSS needs enough storage space on a hard drive to make shadow copies. A shadow copy is the consistent state of VM data and a backup will fail without the necessary space. Once a shadow copy is ready, the backup can carry on without issues.
Install latest integration components:
Integration components are necessary to make sure that system tasks on a VM are performed without problems. For example, OS restart and I/O operations require the help of these components. Therefore, do make sure you install the latest integration components to avoid inconsistency in backups.
Check stability of VSS writers:
Sometimes shadow copies can fail despite the availability of adequate storage space. During such instances, check the state of VSS writers with the following command:
Vssadmin list writers- lists subscribed Volume Shadow Copy writers. If it doesn’t list anything, it means the writer is corrupted.
In that case, restart ‘Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Requestor’ service in the problematic VM to list all VSS writers.
To make sure IT admins are guided properly, Vembu BDR v3.0 addresses these issues with appropriate error message notifications.
Try Vembu BDR v3.0 and experience the power of our seamless Hyper-V backups today:
https://www.bdrsuite.com/vembu-bdr-suite/
Go questions? Email vembu-support@vembu.com for answers.
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