Hyper-V Backup Solutions

[darkZircon]

Hi guys,

I'm a intern for a company that is looking for a hyper-v backup solution. We are in the process of migrating from vmware, and are looking for a way to automatically backup images that are running in a way that they can easily be restored to a different server.

We actually just lost a server due to a power outage. Luckily, it wan't hosting anything critical, but it wasn't backed up. Apparantly, they were just manually shutting down images and exporting them as a strategy. Even worse.. they were exporting them locally. So we're kind of scrambling to get a backup system in place. If possible, we want to be able to run the backups while the image is running. If not, we would like it to shutdown the image properly, do it's backup, and restart automatically.

I've heard of microsoft's data protection manager, but I'm not too sure how it works with virtual machines. Does anyone have experiance with it, or can suggest an alternative? We don't really need all the other stuff DPM can do, we just want to backup hyper-v images and be able to restore on another server.

Thanks

[Sparda]

Where do you intend on keeping the backups and where are the 'live' virtual disks currently stored?

[darkZircon]

We have hyper-v hosts in our company offices for internal use as well as in datacenters in Montreal and LA for hosted client environments (our product is a web-based application).

Internally, I'd like to backup images to a second server as well as an external harddrive.

For our datacenters, what I'd really like is to backup to a second server within the datacenter, and a server in the other datacenter. I'm not too sure how feasable that is though, I've just started looking for possible solutions to offer my mentor there.

[VaKo]

Copy your images to a DFS share locally, and set this share to be replicated to the 2 datacenters. Do the same in each. This way, your images will be stored in 2 other sites should one site die.

[darkZircon]

I had forgotten about DFS, thank you. Now I'm just looking for something to take the backups in the first place.

[VaKo]

Google the Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) Writer.