Practical advice needed

[massimiliano.rizzi]

Hello and good day,

we recently took over the administration of a production Standalone Hyper-V host for a new Veeam B&R customer. This Hyper-V host is running Windows Server 2012 (non-R2) and we've been tasked with switching to Veeam B&R from Windows Server Backup (the customer is currently using it both at the host level and inside a couple of guest VMs).

We've installed the instance of Veeam Backup & Replication on a separate physical Windows-based machine and we've added the source Standalone Hyper-V host to the Veeam Backup & Replication console.

Before going ahead and enable the new Veeam B&R backup job we decided to check the hotfixes and patches already installed on the Microsoft Hyper-V host and surprisingly, we discovered that no hotfixes/patches have ever been installed on the said Microsoft Hyper-V host.

Our goal is to get fully patched on the said Microsoft Hyper-V host as soon as possible, however our priority is to protect all guest VMs running on it using Veeam B&R should the patching process break something since we will need several patching cycles and reboots in order to get fully patched.

I decided to contact support for assistance (Case 02409195) in order to know all the recommended hotfixes and patches for Microsoft Hyper-V Servers that Veeam absolutely recommends that we install on the host prior to starting any Microsoft Hyper-V host-based backup/replication job and the engineer directed us to KB 1838.

Would you refrain from starting any Veeam job until all of the hotfixes and patches listed in KB 1838 have been applied or do you know if only a subset of them is absolutely needed in order to spin a job off ?

Don't get me wrong, I'm just trying to find the safest and fastest way to protect all guest VMs running inside the host while trying to get fully patched on it.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and Regards,
Massimiliano

[PTide]

Hi,

Since your Hyper-V is standalone, I'd say it would make sense to install only those updates that are applicable to your environment, for example you don't need http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2878635 (Update is available that improves the resiliency of the cloud service provider in Windows Server 2012) and those that are related to cluster functionality. Also it won't hurt to use VAW to backup the Hyper-V host before applying any updates, just for the case something goes horribly wrong. The good thing that once Hyper-V VSS is triggered it also triggers VSS inside Windows VMs that reside on the host.

Thanks