Managing Hyper-V Computers

• Protecting standalone or clustered (both CSV and failover cluster are supported) Hyper-V computer
  
  
• Protecting the virtual machine
  
  
• Protecting virtual machine that uses SMB storage
  
  
• Protecting Hyper-V with VM Mobility
  
  

DPM supports online backups for guests running Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2003. Online backups ensure that DPM does not bring down the protected virtual machine.

By default, DPM performs a backup of a Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) in an online state. However, DPM cannot back up a Hyper-V VM in an online state, if one or more of the following conditions are true:

• Backup (Volume Snapshot) Integration Service is disabled or not installed.
  
  
• Virtual machine has one or more dynamic disks.
  
  
• Virtual machine has one or more non-NTFS based volumes.
  
  
• The virtual machine Cluster Resource Group in a cluster setup is offline.
  
  
• Virtual machine is not in a running state.
  
  
• A ShadowStorage assignment of a volume inside the virtual machine is explicitly set to a different volume other than itself.
  
  

These conditions are set by the Hyper-V writer. In such a case, the virtual machine is put in a saved state before a snapshot of host volumes are taken (except when the virtual machine is turned off) for a backup. The Hyper-V writer adds the virtual machine in the following format:

• For offline backups: Backup Using Saved State\<VMName>
  
  
• For online backups: Backup Using Child Partition Snapshot\<VMName>
  
  

Note
During offline/online backups, the name of the data source remains unchanged even if the virtual machine configuration changes to support online backups or for any further backups.

DPM supports offline protection for guests running older operating systems such as Windows NT 4.0 and Windows Server 2000, and Linux. Offline backup requires DPM to pause a virtual server, take a snapshot of the server, bring the virtual server online again, and then back up the data on the snapshot.

• Hyper-V host and DPM server on different domains.
  
  
• DPM does not support the backup of virtual machine data on pass-through disks that present volumes to the virtual machine or use a remote VHD. For such machines, we recommend that you perform host-level backup of the VHD files using DPM and install an agent into the virtual machine to back up data that is not visible on the host.
  
  
• DPM does not support backup and recovery of virtual machines on Hyper-V replica servers.
  
  

• Prerequisites for Hyper-V protection
  
  
• Deploying Hyper-V protection
  
  
• Protecting Hyper-V machines
  
  
• Recovering Hyper-V data
  
  
• Understanding protection for CSV