About Hyper-V protection

Unitrends offers all-in-one backup, replication, archiving, and disaster recovery for Hyper-V virtual infrastructure in an integrated fashion from the Administrator Interface. The Unitrends Hyper-V Host Operating System (HOS) agent leverages the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to offer centralized and efficient protection of hosted virtual machines. The Unitrends appliance can protect VMs in online, offline, and saved states. You must install Hyper-V Integration Services on your VMs to protect them in an online state.

When you add a Hyper-V host to the system, the HOS agent is automatically installed (pushed to the Hyper-V system) as part of the Windows agent. You can then protect all VMs under that host without having to add individual VMs to the Unitrends backup system. Before adding a host, see Prerequisites for Hyper-V protection to be sure installation prerequisites have been met.

In some instances, you might wish to protect VMs at the guest OS level by installing the appropriate agents, adding them to the appliance as you would add physical machines, and running the appropriate file-level and application backups. For example, if you are running applications such as SQL, Exchange, or Sharepoint on a Hyper-V VM, you will have more granular control of database backups and restores if you add these VMs to the appliance and run the relevant application backups. For more information, see Protecting Hyper-V virtual machines at the guest OS level.

Note: You should not run Hyper-V backups for VMs that you are protecting at the guest OS level. Doing so can lead to undesirable results.

To protect the file system and operating system of the Hyper-V host, you must run file-level backups and use Unitrends bare metal protection. For details, see File-level Backups and Windows Hot Bare Metal Protection. Any files belonging to the Hyper-V application are automatically excluded from file-level backups of the Hyper-V host.

It is recommended that you read Best practices for protecting Hyper-V virtual machines before you begin protecting your Hyper-V environment.

Features of Unitrends Hyper-V protection

     Protection for virtual machines running under Windows Server 2008 R2 and higher and Windows Hyper-V Server 2012 and higher.

     Support for virtual machines residing in a High Availability setup using Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV).

     Support and tracking of virtual machines in live migration configuration.

     Support for VMs with disk storage located on SMB 3.0 shares. (Unitrends releases 8.0 and higher. For details, see Protecting Hyper-V virtual machines with storage located on SMB 3.0 shares.)

     Full and incremental backups.

     Backup of virtual machines in online, offline, and saved states.

     File-level restore from backups.

     Native provisioning for thin-provisioned disks.

     Change Block Tracking (CBT).

     Policy-based automatic inclusion of newly created virtual machines into backup schedules.

     Byte-level deduplication of protected virtual machine data.

     AES-256 bit encryption of protected data.

     Archiving of Hyper-V backups via D2D2D (Disk-to-Disk-to-Disk) or D2D2T (Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape).

     Instant recovery of a corrupt or failed virtual machine. (Unitrends releases 8.0 and higher. For details, see Instant recovery for Hyper-V.)

For details about Unitrends Hyper-V protection, see the following topics:

     Prerequisites for Hyper-V protection

     About Hyper-V backups

     Best practices for protecting Hyper-V virtual machines

     Protecting Hyper-V virtual machines at the guest OS level

     Protecting Hyper-V virtual machines with storage located on SMB 3.0 shares