Protecting Hyper-V Hosts

[leetansey]

Dear Community,

I have two Hyper-V Hosts that run 7 VMs between them, with replication jobs to ensure availability of all VMs should one of the hosts fail. The VMs are also backed up to NAS each night and copied offsite daily with a backup copy job.

My question is around protecting the Hyper-V hosts themselves. Is it possible for Veeam Agent for Windows (licensed) to perform a backup of the entire host, including the running VMs, or is Veeam Agent for Windows only designed to protect physical machines that do not host virtualised guest operating systems?

I am not concerned about backing up the VMs twice, but rather I want a robust way of expediting the recovery of a host in the event of a failure.

Many thanks,

[HannesK]

Hello,
yes, in small environments without automated installation, many customers install the Veeam agent for Windows directly on the Hyper-V root partition (the Windows user interface you see).

Most of them do not backup the VMs because it takes a long time and is not space efficient as they run normal backups anyways.

Best regards,
Hannes

[leetansey]

Thank you for your response Hannes. I looked to exclude the virtual machines from the Veeam Agent backup but there was no option if I wanted bare metal recovery of the host, can you confirm this is indeed the case?

[HannesK]

Hello,
I assume that you don't have virtual machines on c:\ drive... so choosing volume level backup with "operating system" checkbox checked would do the job.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agent ... tml?ver=40

Best regards,
Hannes

[leetansey]

Unfortunately I do have VMs on the c:\ drive as it has been configured as a single partition. Is the Veeam Agent backup software able quiesce the VMs so that they can be recovered an application-consistent state? If so then I don't mind taking the hit on storage space. I intend to use USB external hard drives for this purpose and not my NAS storage.

[HannesK]

the VMs are just flat files from the agent perspective. There is no way to tell a file (that just by chance contains a VM) to make the operating system inside that file application consistent.

[leetansey]

Thanks for the clarification. So when Veeam Agent for Windows creates a Microsoft VSS snapshot of the host volume, it will backup the VMs as flat files without application consistency provided at a VM guest level. This should therefore result in a recoverable host with VMs in a crash consistent state. Is this a reasonable assumption to make?

[HannesK]

yes - that's what I tried to say.

[leetansey]

Great, thanks!