Host-based backup of Microsoft Hyper-V VMs.
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tim5700
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Veeam Zip vs. Hyper-V VM with snapshots.

Post by tim5700 »

I inherited an environment with a Hyper-V 2008 R2 host with no backups. The plan is to move them to VMware and Veeam. While looking at the Hyper-V environment, the mission critical VM has a snapshot taken in 2010. I installed Veeam Free and have performed VeeamZips of the VM. I got an alert that one of the drives is nearly full. I need to expand the hard drive.

I can't expand the drive since it has a snapshot. But to delete/merge the snapshot will take a very long time (2+ year old snapshot). My proposed plan of action:

1. Power off the VM and take a Veeam Zip.
2. Restore the VM to an alternate location.
3. Grow the drive in Hyper-V followed by expanding it in Windows.

Question is, does VeeamZip retain snapshots during the backup process?

Is there any thing I am missing on this?
Gostev
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Re: Veeam Zip vs. Hyper-V VM with snapshots.

Post by Gostev »

Hello, your plan looks good to me. VeeamZIP will backup the current (latest) VM state, which is exactly what you want. VeeamZIP will not touch your existing VM snapshots. Good luck!
zerodmg
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Re: Veeam Zip vs. Hyper-V VM with snapshots.

Post by zerodmg »

Hi i am in the situation that i have a machine with snapshots in a disk drive without free space to delete the snapshots , i could use veam zip to backup it or the lack of free space in the hyper-v machine could affect the backup?
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Veeam Zip vs. Hyper-V VM with snapshots.

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Hi Martin,

How much free space do you have on the disk? During VeeamZIP Veeam backup server triggers a VSS snapshot of the necessary volume, so you should have enough space for this operation.

Thanks!
yizhar
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Re: Veeam Zip vs. Hyper-V VM with snapshots.

Post by yizhar »

Hi.

> I can't expand the drive since it has a snapshot. But to delete/merge the snapshot will take a very long time (2+ year old snapshot).
Merge will take long time indeed, however it depends on the size of the AVHD file(s) and not the age- over time the same blocks in the AVHD are overwritten so it shouldn't matter how old it is - just the size.
You will need free disk space however - whether for MERGE or other actions such as RESTORE.

In anycase, for the safety I suggest taking also an in guest backup (using windows server backup for example), in addition to what you already have with VeeamZip.
I suggest this before any further action, keeping the backup on different host/media (could be a PC with shared folder - for this onetime backup).

Yizhar
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