Back up Hyper-V virtual machines

Data Protection for Microsoft Hyper-V creates an incremental-forever full or incremental-forever incremental backup of Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). A consistent snapshot is taken of the VM, and the VM is backed up to the IBM Spectrum Protect™ server.

You can back up Hyper-V VMs that exist on a local disk, a storage area network (SAN) attached disk, or Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). For example, you can back up VMs that are stored on CSVs in a Hyper-V cluster environment or on Server Message Block (SMB) file shares that are on a remote system. You can back up any guest operating systems that are supported by the Hyper-V server on remote shares, regardless of whether IBM Spectrum Protect supports them directly.

The following backup types are supported for Microsoft Hyper-V VMs with virtual disks that use the VHDX disk format:

Incremental-forever full backup: Creates a backup of snapshot disk data to the IBM Spectrum Protect server.
Incremental-forever incremental backup: Creates a snapshot of the blocks that changed since the last incremental-forever full backup or incremental-forever incremental backup.

If you are running the Hyper-V host on the Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system, Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is used to create a consistent snapshot of the VM. Changes that occur in the VM between each backup are tracked in a snapshot differencing file.

If you are running the Hyper-V host on a Windows Server 2016 or later operating system, snapshots are created by using a Windows API, and resilient change tracking (RCT) is used to track changes in a VHDX disk between each backup operation.