Back up virtual machines on a Hyper-V system
You can use the backup-archive client to backup virtual machines that are managed by a Microsoft Hyper-V server.
Important: The following information applies only to Hyper-V backup and restore
operations for Tivoli® Storage Manager configurations that do
not have a license file for the Tivoli Storage Manager for
Virtual Environments: Data Protection for Microsoft
Hyper-V product installed. If you have that
license installed, use the Hyper-V protection procedures that are documented at IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments, Data Protection for Microsoft Hyper-V.
You can use the backup-archive client to perform the following tasks on Hyper-V systems:
- Back up and restore snapshots of Hyper-V virtual machines by using the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) interface. You can restore a virtual machine from these files, which are created by VSS.
- Restore either individual virtual machines or a group of virtual machines that are running on a Hyper-V server.
- Back up data without stopping the virtual machine or stopping any running applications within
the virtual machine.Restriction: You can back up data this way only if the operating system of the virtual machine supports VSS. For more information about this restriction, see the "Planning for backup" article in the Hyper-V section of the Microsoft TechNet support site, which is at https://technet.microsoft.com.
- Add backup and restore support for guest operating systems without installing a backup-archive client on the guest VM.
- Back up and restore any guest operating systems that are hosted by the Hyper-V server on remote shares, regardless of whether the guest operating system is supported by Tivoli Storage Manager.
For both disaster recovery and long-term data backup support, perform the following steps:
- Install the backup-archive client on the physical Hyper-V host server in the parent partition. The server must use Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2012, or newer operating system.
- On the Tivoli Storage Manager server, define a single node for the Hyper-V system.
- Back up a running virtual machine from the backup-archive client
GUI or from the command line:
- From Backup window in the backup-archive client GUI, expand the Hyper-V VMs container, and select the virtual machine to back up.
- You can also enter dsmc backup vm -vmlist=vm1 -vmbackuptype=HyperVFull at a Tivoli Storage Manager command prompt, where vm1 is the name of the virtual machine.
Important:- If the virtual machine is not fully VSS-compliant (the operating
system supports VSS, and all virtual hard disks (VHD) are configured
to support VSS):
- The virtual machine that is running pauses
- A snapshot is taken
- The virtual machine resumes
- Restore a virtual machine:
- From the Restore window in the backup-archive client GUI, expand the Hyper-V VMs container, and select the virtual machine to restore.
- You can also enter: dsmc restore vm vm1 -vmbackuptype=HyperVFull at a client command prompt, where vm1 is the name of the virtual machine.
Important: When you restore a virtual machine, the existing virtual machine is stopped, and all files that comprise the existing virtual machine (for example, VHD files) are deleted. If the virtual machine is a member of a Windows Server 2012 (or newer version) cluster, the virtual machine is taken offline from the cluster, which stops the virtual machine. Then, the files are deleted and the virtual machine is restored from the Tivoli Storage Manager backup. When the backup snapshot is restored, the virtual machine is re-created, including any Hyper-V snapshots that existed when the files were backed up.
To schedule backups of Hyper-V virtual machines, create a schedule
on the server to run the backups. When you define the schedule, specify ACTION=BACKUP, SUBACTION=VM, and add the -VMBACKUPTYPE=HYPERVFULL option to the OPTIONS parameter. The following shows a sample schedule definition for
backing up Hyper-V virtual machines:
define sched standard HyperV-Backup type=client description="backup hyperv vms"
action=backup subaction=vm options="-vmbackuptype=hypervfull"VMLIST VM1,VM2,VM99- Hyper-V backup support limitations
Because of the tight integration of Microsoft Failover Clustering with Cluster Shared Volumes and Hyper-V, the following limitations apply when you are using the backup-archive client.