When you’re making a recovery plan and back-up of your virtual environment, you should take into consideration the various factors that may interfere with your back-up such as: the state of the virtual machine at the time you made the back-up (system state, shut down, running) and the type of storage you use for these back-ups.

The integration of the support service with the Volume Shadow Copy service of Hyper-V allows you to make a back-up of both the virtual machine as well as the Hyper-V configuration. There are two basic methods you can use for this type of back-up:

1. Make a back-up copy from inside of the operating system of a virtual machine. This method is useful when you need to save data from a storage device that is not supported by Hyper-V VSS.

2. Make a back-up from the Hyper-V server. This is the most recommended method for making a complete back-up of the server because it captures more data than the first method. If the storage device is compatible with Hyper-V and Hyper-V VSS, you can make a complete back-up of the server that will help protect all the data required to re-install the server in case of failure. A back-up copy includes the configuration of the virtual machine and networks, snapshots associated with the virtual machine and virtual hard disks used by the machine. As a result, this method makes it easier to recover from failures because you do not have to re-create the virtual machine or re-configure the system.

If you want to stay updated on Microsoft virtualization news, please come back to visit the virtualization team blog.

A big thank you to rcolomo for inspiring this article.