Lead Image © ximagination, fotolia.com
Back up virtual machines and clusters
Flexible Security
Vembu BDR Suite [1] helps you back up Hyper-V and VMware ESXi environments with up to 10 virtual machines (VMs) free of charge. In this article, I back up a Hyper-V host and start by installing an agent for the connection – the Vembu integration service (VIS) – that is also capable of backing up server-based services such as Exchange or SQL Server on the VMs.
You do not need to install any additional software on the virtual machines themselves. In addition to standalone Hyper-V hosts, you can also back up clusters with Vembu. For the backup, the vendor draws on the Hyper-V volume shadow copy service (VSS). The VMs are therefore included in the backup, instead of just copying the virtual hard drives and their data.
Vembu BDR Suite also relies on resilient change tracking (RCT) in Windows Server 2016 and 2019, a feature that allows backup software to detect which data has changed on the virtual disks since the last full backup so that only the changed data is saved. In this case, the virtual hard drive consists of blocks. If you perform a full backup, all blocks are backed up to a repository.
However, for the next backup, you will only want to back up the changed blocks. The change block tracker creates a bitmap of all the blocks on the virtual hard drive. As soon as the data in a block changes, it is marked accordingly. At the time of a backup, the backup software only needs to check the bitmap for all blocks that have changed since the last backup and then simply backs up the changed blocks.
This method has been possible without additional functions since Windows Server 2016 with RCT. RCT creates three bitmaps: one in memory and two on the hard disk, which ensures that the bitmaps are not lost. As long as the VM is running, the backup software checks the bitmap and only backs up the changed blocks when an incremental backup is requested. If a VM is migrated or a power failure
...
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy ADMIN Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Related content
-
Protect Hyper-V with on-board resources
With the right settings and small tools, security in virtual environments can be increased significantly by tweaking the on-board tools. -
Hyper-V containers with Windows Server 2016
The release of Windows Server 2016 also heralds a new version of Hyper-V, with improved cloud security, flexible virtual hardware, rolling upgrades of Hyper-V clusters, and production checkpoints. -
Hyper-V 3.0 in Windows Server 2012
In the old Hyper-V hypervisor from Microsoft, many features for professional use were missing. The new version 3.0 has been significantly improved and is slowly catching up to VMware.
-
System Center 2012 SP1: What's new?
Service Pack 1 expands System Center 2012 primarily in terms of features for virtualization and cloud computing. We provide the details in this article. -
Hyper-V failover with Azure Site Recovery
Back up Hyper-V with Azure Site Recovery and prepare for failover.