Did your solution work out for you as mentioned above?
I’m trying to find a good way to do this in VMware with an SBS 2008 SP2 (Not R2).

The customer originally was backing up to eSATA drives that also have a USB connection on them.
The USB connection is so much slower though that I’m having trouble getting the nightly backup to complete.
I was running a backup to a NAS device but am running into the same speed related issue when trying to get the backup copied to the external drive for offsite storage.
I wanted to hook up an eSATA card in the host but have not found one that is supported.

Thanks,
Marshall

From the host, I have it set to backup the “backup VHD” from the SBS guest. All of the backups are staggered so none conflict with each other. Each night the SBS updates it’s dynamic VHD backup file on the TB raid, then the host backs up that VHD file to a USB. Then someone swaps the USB drive daily. Does anyone see any issues with this solution?

Perhaps it will work without removing and later re-attaching the SCSI drive – but doing so seems more robust to me, and it is very easy using the script.

Tim

@Vu Binh: I was referring to dismounting the volume on the HOST, not from inside the VM. If you can’t set up the drive for safe removal, dismounting it is supposed to flush the cache and make it safe for removal. It might work in the VM too. I have since switched to Windows Server 2008 R2 as my Hyper-V host. In the GUI environment, I use HotSwap! on the host, which I think also dismounts and/or uninstalls the volume (http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm). That works well at least for eSATA drives. It can also work from the command line but I haven’t tried that.

@Tim 7/12/10: Interesting approach. I’m now running SBS 08 under Hyper-V. When I tested the bare metal restore, I also ran into the can’t-see-SCSI-drives issue. I was told this is because the drivers are not available in the SBS 08 recovery environment. I did not try loading the drivers. IIRC, I did the restore this way:

1. Attach the backup VHD as one IDE and the VHD for SBS 08 Drive C: as the other IDE.

2. Did the bare metal restore using the SBS 08 recovery environment. This gives you bootable SBS with drive C: only.

3. Reset my original VM config (C: and D: on IDE, G: and the backup VHD on SCSI drives).

4. Boot into SBS, which can see the SCSI drives. It’s not happy that shares and Exchange data are missing, but too bad. Use Windows Server Backup to restore D: and G: from the backup VHD. Reboot.

To me this seems more natural than using the host wbadmin to restore guest volumes, but I can see how that should work too.

Also FWIW I copy the VHD file to a second eSATA drive without removing it from SBS. I’m assuming this would fail if the VHD were in use, but it seems to work fine as long as I schedule the copy long after the SBS backup. I used the copied VHD to test the restore and had no problem with that. Have you tried that? Is removing the SCSI drive really necessary?

Am I right in thinking that the USB drive is mounted as a pass-through drive? That’s the only reason I can think of for taking it offline in the host.

In this case I’d have thought you could do a scheduled backup, but you cannot swap to another USB drive as envisaged by the backup application.

Personally I prefer backing up to an internal VHD. You can then copy the backup VHD to an external drive as described in the article.

Another idea is to use a network USB hub such as a Belkin F5L009 – I’ve not tried this, but it might well work.

Tim

Thanks so much for such an informative blog. I am just starting to get a handle on backing up the SBS 2008 that I have running on a hyper V system host that is enterprise 2008 R2.

I found that by taking a usb hard drive offline in the host operating system that I could use the usb hard drive to create another virtual HD using an ide controller in the virtual machines settings.

I am able to do an unscheduled backup to this drive but unfortunately it does not appear in the list of available drives with which to schedule a back up.

Also after reading your post I am not sure if the backup on my VHD (located on my external USB drive) would be any good for a restore.

Mark

I’ve successfully completed a bare metal recovery using just the backup VHD. I’ve updated the article with some notes on this. Essentially, I attached the backup initially to the IDE controller for system recovery of the C drive. Then I used wbadmin on the host – but still with the backup made from the guest – to restore the other VHDs.

Tim

@Vu have you tried this technique for extracting the SCSI drivers:

http://www.windeploy.co.uk/blog/index.php/2009/10/extracting-hyper-v-r2-drivers/

Note that you can also backup the VM from the host.

Tim