Host-based backup of Microsoft Hyper-V VMs.
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Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by spgsit5upport »

How do I go about backing up VM Guest Failover Cluster with shared vhdx?

Obviously same vhdx is assigned to two (or more) cluster members.

I do not want to have them backed up x-number of times

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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Hi Seb,

Shared VHDX virtual disks cannot be backed up, as Microsoft does not currently support host-level backup of these disks.

Thanks!
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by spgsit5upport »

But that is madness! I have FOC which can not be backed up!

I do not want agents inside VM!

Now I need to ditch the cluster idea to get the backup going.

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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Gostev » 1 person likes this post

spgsit5upport wrote:But that is madness! I have FOC which can not be backed up!
You are not alone, being Hyper-V MVP I can tell you that many Hyper-V users are screaming the same words at Microsoft, because lack of backup means the actual feature is plain useless. So, I am sure this omission is a priority for Microsoft to address. To be fair though, this approach is not a unique situation in the industry - for example, VMware released Fault Tolerant VMs many years ago, and these VMs still cannot be backed up with VADP today.

The good news is that we managed to add crash-consistent Shared VHDX backup to B&R v8, and I think we can all agree that crash-consistent backup is infinitely better than no backup at all ;)
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by spgsit5upport »

So I can upgrade to 8 (maintenance comes handy) and have a backup of shared vhdxs? Sure, crash consistent is way better then none!

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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Yes, that's correct.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by spgsit5upport »

But that is yet some way off, right?

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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by veremin »

According to the plan, v8 should be released in late Q3, 2014. Thanks.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

You can also subscribe to this page in order to be notified about its availability > http://go.veeam.com/availability-suite-v8
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by RGijsen »

Sorry to resurrect this rather old thread, but I think there have been more than enough threads about this so donn't want to open yet another one. I've been struggeling to 'sell' Veeam to myself being the decision maker on that. We have clustered fileservers, Exchange and SQL. While SQL and Exchange have some alternatives like mirroring and DAGs (at the cost of alot of storage) DFS is not really an alternative for us for the fileservers.

While Hyper-V does not support snapshotting shared disks, I wonder why it isn't possible to use the offhost proxy to mount the storage directly on the SAN. As hardware snapshots are used there it doesn't make a difference even if the VHDX was shared or not. When used together with quiesce / VSS inside the guest to properly 'stall' the FS I don't understand why even Veeam V8 will only support crash-consistent. I must be overlooking something evident here but I just don't get it.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Hello,
RGijsen wrote: I wonder why it isn't possible to use the offhost proxy to mount the storage directly on the SAN.
To the best of my knowledge Microsoft does not have any ways to create a VSS snapshot of the volume with shared vhdx files in-place.
RGijsen wrote:When used together with quiesce / VSS inside the guest to properly 'stall' the FS I don't understand why even Veeam V8 will only support crash-consistent.
As far as I know there is no way to create a in-guest VSS snapshot of shared VHDX, that is why only crash-consistent backup is possible.

Thank you!
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by RGijsen » 1 person likes this post

Hi,
yes its true MS doesn't support VSS snapshots on host-level. However, it's absolutely possible to create in-guest VSS of the filesystem with shared VHDX. We have used in-guest snapshots for years on our fileserver-cluster. Several months ago we moved that from physical machines to Hyper-V guests with virtual HBA's. Still with VSS enabled and working fine. I recently moved the SAN LUN's to shared VHDX files, to prepare for V8's somehow-ability to backup them. VSS however still works and is perfectly supported - wouldn't make sense to have a file-cluster that doens't support VSS; inaddition, in-guest VSS ofcourse stays inside the vhdx file - or on the clustered disk in this instance.

To prove my 'theory' what I did is the following:
on a testcluster I created a few in-guest snapshots of a clustered fileshare-disk that's a shared vhdx. I can make snapshots inside the guest just fine:
Image

Creating snapshots on hyper-v host level is not possible. Creating a snapshot on the storage though (which could be done on a OffHost proxy) is ofcourse possible. The VHDX in that snapshot is not consistent ofcourse, but the in-guest snapshot inside that VHDX is. I mapped the storage snapshot to a machine here and can access that just fine after assigning it a driveletter for convenience. The Veeam_cluster_test.vhdx is the actual shared vhdx:
Image

Then I copied the VHDX file to a local disk. Powershell doesn't seem to support mounting a VHDX on write-protected media, even if I supply the -readonly switch. That's not an issue for Veaam though, as the off-site proxy has read-only access to the snapshots anyway and can access the file.
Mounting the image file and listing the snapshots inside that vhdx:
Image

Then using a regular cmd prompt I use mklink to mount that snapshot and presto; I can access all snapshots in the VHDX like that, and could if I want even easily move between snapshots in that vhdx:
Image


So while this is a very awkward way of doing things, it DOES show I can have consistent data INSIDE a vhdx using in-guest VSS and after that snapshots on the storage box. The VM does not have to power down, in fact it kept running while I made this test for this post. While I know my approach here is more on file level than on block-level, I would kill to see Veaam support backing up cluster disks - even if through file level. Clusters are not passé, in fact I really advocate the use of them to save on storage (DAG / mirrors / DFS all require storage * numbers of hosts) which is expensive for small companies like we are. However, you guys probably have insane knowledge of working on blocklevel, so maybe you can even extract whatever you need in block-level from the VHDX.

I have this test setup available at any time, might you want to see this just contact me. Glad to help if I can.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by spgsit5upport »

So does V8 support backup of shared vhdx OOB without anything else needed?

Just select them & go?

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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by foggy »

Yes, shared VHDX can now be backed up in a crash-consistent state.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by spgsit5upport »

So indeed that is the case. Nice, thanks.

Does it matter which node is selected for the backup? (in my test I used the node that did NOT owe the disks at the time, but the backup happened anyway, apart from one drive not presenting letter during restore process)

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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by foggy »

No, this should not matter.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

RGijsen wrote:I have this test setup available at any time, might you want to see this just contact me. Glad to help if I can.
Great post and good knowledge of how everything works in Hyper-V. Sorry for the late reply.

What you have just done is basically what Hyper-V VSS writer does when backing up VMs on the host. Unfortunately, this writer is not currently capable of doing the same VSS freeze for shared VHDX, which we are using for backing up Hyper-V VMs.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by spgsit5upport »

foggy wrote:No, this should not matter.
But how to backup the send VM of the cluster?

Will the shared disk be tried to be backed up ONE MORE TIME?

If I select Exclusions & System Disk Only, I get Size of the VM as 0.0 Kb, only way to get it was to select disk/SCSI & then chose the disks I need for this VM

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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by foggy »

It will be backed up twice, if nodes are backed up by different jobs. If they are in a single job, the disk will be snapshotted twice (within each node), however backed up with the first node only. The second node backup will contain differences for this disk between the snapshots.
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[MERGED] Suggestion to backup data through shared VHDX

Post by Someonenew2014 »

Hi...

We are using shared VHDX and would like to take backup in application consistent-state. We know it is not supported.

We are looking for options/ideas to make it work with Veeam.


Appreciate your cooperation in this matter.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by mdallagi »

Hi, here the same problem :-(

and today the Veeam support also confirmed to me that the v9 doesn't yest support this.
any forecast for this functionality?

Thanks.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Someonenew2014 »

We know it will not be suppoertrd and it is a Microsoft thing. It is a limitation.

We are looking for workaround from Veeam, some vendors provide Agent for such a case.

I'm sure Veeam can find workaround for this issue.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Massimo, cannot make any forecasts on availability of this functionality, let's see what improvements a new version of Hyper-V will bring. Most VM image-level backup vendors cannot do backups of these VMs at all. One of the possible solutions would be, indeed, to run an in-guest script/agent to initiate VSS freeze during a VM-level backup job, though it would bring more complexity into overall backup job management.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Someonenew2014 »

Hi,

I saw many posts talking about Hyper-v 2016 new features (Shared vhdx).Windows Server 2016 many of these limitations have been removed and key features with shared VHDX now include:

Dynamic resize (resizing while VMs are running)
Host level backup
Hyper-V Replica support


http://windowsitpro.com/windows-server- ... erver-2016


How this sounds ???
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by foggy »

Promising. ;) However nothing specific at the moment, we have yet to take a look at it.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Andreas Neufert »

Do our Change Block Tracking work with these shared VHDX disks or is it Snap and Scan Backup?
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Yes, it does work as with regular disks.
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Andreas Neufert »

Cool Thx
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Andreas Neufert »

I´m sorry ... follow up question by a customer.... will Indexing work for 1-Click File Restore ?
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Re: Backing up a Windows Failover Cluster with Shared vhdx?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Yes, that would be possible too.
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