Prerequisites for virtual machine protection

 

Updated: May 13, 2016

Applies To: System Center 2012 SP1 - Data Protection Manager, System Center 2012 - Data Protection Manager, System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager

After reading about available Hyper-V backup scenarios in Back up and restore Hyper-V virtual machines, verify the prerequisites.

DPM prerequisites

  1. If you want to perform item-level recovery for virtual machines (recover files, folders, volumes) then you’ll need to install the Hyper-V role on the DPM server. DPM. If you only want to recover the virtual machine and not item-level then the role isn’t required.

  2. You can protect up to 800 virtual machines of 100 GB each on one DPM server and allows multiple DPM servers that support larger clusters.

  3. DPM excludes the page file from incremental backups to improve virtual machine backup performance.

  4. DPM can backup a Hyper-V server or cluster in the same domain as the DPM server, or in a child or trusted domain. If you want to backup Hyper-V in a workgroup or an untrusted domain you’ll need to set up authentication. For a single Hyper-V server you can use NTLM or certificate authentication. For a cluster you can use certificate authentication only. For more information see Back up and restore workloads in workgroups and untrusted domains.

  5. Using host-level backup to back up virtual machine data on passthrough disks isn’t supported. In this scenario we recommend you use host-level back to backup VHD files and guest-level back to back up the other data that isn’t visible on the host.

  6. When protecting a Hyper-V cluster using scaled-out DPM protection (multiple DPM server protecting a large Hyper-V cluster) you can’t add secondary protection for the protected Hyper-V workloads.

  7. You can only backup replica virtual machines if DPM is running System Center 2012 R2 and the Hyper-V host is running on Windows Server 2012 R2.

  8. You can back up deduplicated volumes

Hyper-V prerequisites

  • Make sure the server meets Hyper-V requirements. For more information, see Install the Hyper-V Role and Configure a Virtual Machine.

  • For CSV storage, install the Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) hardware provider on the Hyper-V server. Contact your storage area network (SAN) vendor for the VSS hardware provider.

Virtual machine prerequisites

  • The version of Integration Components that is running on the virtual machine should be the same as the version of Hyper-V on the server that is running Hyper-V.

  • For each virtual machine backup you’ll need free space on the volume hosting the virtual hard disk files to allow Hyper-V enough room for differencing disks (AVHD’s) during backup. The space must be at least equal to the calculation Initial disk size*Churn rate*Backup window time. If you’re running multiple backups on a cluster, you’ll need enough storage capacity to accommodate the AVHDs for each of the virtual machines using this calculation.

  • If you want to backup virtual machines located on a Hyper-V host servers running Windows Server 2012 R2, the virtual machine should have a SCSI controller specified, even if it’s not connected to anything. This is because for online backup in Windows Server 2012 R2 the Hyper-V host mounts a new VHD in the VM and then dismounts it later. Only the SCSI controller can support this and thus is required for online backup of the virtual machine. The SCSI controller doesn’t it became clear why we need this SCSI controller. Without this setting, event ID 10103 will be issued when you try to back up the virtual machine.

Linux prerequisites

  • You can backup Linux virtual machines using DPM 2012 R2. Only file-consistent snapshots are supported.

Next steps

Set up protection for virtual machines with CSV storageSet up protection for virtual machines with CSV storage

Set up protection for virtual machines with SMB storage

Set up protection for live migration

Support for protecting replica virtual machines