Comments on: Using backup on Windows Hyper-V Server or Server Core

By: tim

tim — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:03:10 +0000

Gary

64-bit guest will only work on a 64-bit CPU.

I have a spare machine running the free hyper-v server which I use for test restores.

Tim

By: Gary

Gary — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:01:53 +0000

Excellent Tim, thanks for alerting me to to this. In a small business environment, it not alway possible to have an extra server to test out the restore procedure, do you know if I could install VMWare on a XP 32bit machine, create guest VM then do a full restore of the wbadmin system backup? I think it would fail due to it being 32bit, wondered if you had any experience of this at all?

regards

By: Zach

Zach — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:58:35 +0000

I don’t see a WindowsServerBackup key in the registry on Hyper-V Server. Is there another place to enable VSS for Hyper-V?

By: tim

tim — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 19:12:47 +0000

@Alan

I don’t understand why USB is not recognized on the host? On the guest, yes. But you can back up from the host using the built-in backup, to an external USB drive.

Tim

By: Alan

Alan — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:47:53 +0000

I inherited a Hyper-V server with two VMs running on it. I’m looking for the best way to backup the VMs and thought this might be an option, but as USB is not recognized on the host, I don’t know how viable an option this is. Any recommendations that would not include buying a tape library or third-party software?

By: tim

tim — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:16:32 +0000

@Duncan

Thanks for the info about vshadow, interesting.

I’ve corrected the ocsetup command.

Tim

By: Duncan Smart

Duncan Smart — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:31:05 +0000

Interesting stuff. I’m investigating the same sort of stuff at the moment and am having good results using the VShadow.exe from the SDK (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530725.aspx) in doing a volume snapshot and then exposing as a remote share which our existing (robocopy based) backup system pulls from. Something like this:

vshadow -p -script=vshadowvars.cmd C:
call vshadowvars.cmd
vshadow -er=%SHADOW_ID_1%,MySnapshot

…then we can backup \\server\MySnapshot,

It’s interesting to watch the server using Hyper-V Manager as the “vshadow -p” comand runs and all the machines get automatically snapshotted. Ones without integration services (e.g. Linux) get briefly hibernated.

(VShadow is probably already on your dev box if you have Visual Studio installed: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin\x64\vsstools)

I’ve shied away from using Window Server Backup because I have a hard-earned aversion to proprietary backup formats. But hearing that it uses VHD as its format means I might take a look now.

Odd that you have to go through registry shenanigans to make Windows Server Backup work with Hyper-V, whereas it worked out of the box for vshadow.

By the way, rhe install command is just “ocsetup WindowsServerBackup” (no “/install”)