Friday, October 31, 2008

Online Backup of Hyper-V Virtual Machines - Part 1

You must have created numerous virtual machines on your Hyper-V servers now. Ever consider how to do backup of your VMs?? Without shutting down or put your VMs on saved state?
Do not misunderstood snapshot as backup. No, snapshot is a point in time image of your virtual machine. You will lost everything if you lose the base machine.
There are a few methods that online backup works now.
1. Use Windows Server Backup that is shipped with Windows 2008. However, restoring can be hard with this option.
2. Stop the virtual machine or put it on saved state. Then copy the VHD and export the configuration files. This option is considering that you can stop this server.
3. Solutions from 3rd party vendors. For example, Symantec BackupExec 12.5 provides this option.
4. Use DiskShadow cmdlet plus some scripting.

Let me share with you how to use DiskShadow to do a online backup of your Hyper-V virtual machines.

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