Hyper-V backup using Windows Server Backup

Hey all,

Here’s a rough guide to backing up Hyper-V guests (partitions) from the host (root) machine using the drive imaging method in BackupAssist.

    1. Activate the Hyper-V VSS writer for Windows Server Backup by clicking the checkbox as shown below.
    2. Make sure each guest machine has the Backup integration service selected. Start the Hyper-V manager console, and right click on each guest machine and select “Settings”. Then make sure the checkbox shown below is turned on.
    3. Turn on Shadow Copies on each of your source volumes. As explained in Getting Hyper-V Backups to run fast, this will greatly enhance the speed of your backups.

We’re currently writing a white paper on Hyper-V backups, which will include performance benchmarking, recommended best practices and restore procedures. However, this will probably take another month or so… so that’s why I’ve blogged about the 3 steps above so everyone can get started in the meantime.

Enjoy!

Linus

2 thoughts on “Hyper-V backup using Windows Server Backup”

  1. In Hyper-V R2 using dynamic disks should be OK – Microsoft have done a lot of work on dynamic disks for this release focussed on performance – expect around 50% performance increase in certain scenarios.

    Reply

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