Best practices for protecting Hyper-V virtual machines

This section provides a list of best practices for protecting your Hyper-V virtual machines.

     Follow Microsoft’s best practices for virtualization. For a list of Microsoft documents on virtualization, see Microsoft Virtualization: Hyper V best practices.

     Install the latest version of Integration Services on all supported operating systems to ensure that the Unitrends appliance can run online backups of your Hyper-V VMs. For more information, see Online backups.

     After making any configuration changes to a VM in the Hyper-V manager, such as creating or deleting a snapshot, adding a new disk, or converting a disk from VHD to VHDX format, you must run a new full backup to ensure the integrity of the VM’s backup groups. After running a new full back up, you can continue protecting the VM with its existing schedule.

     A cluster with a single cluster shared volume does not follow Microsoft’s best practices and may be unreliable. If you have VMs in a cluster with a single CSV, protect them as if they are physical machines. For details, see Protecting Hyper-V virtual machines at the guest OS level.

     In some instances, it is recommended that you protect Hyper-V VMs at the guest OS level and protect them the same way you would protect physical machines. For details, see Protecting Hyper-V virtual machines at the guest OS level.

     Do not run Hyper-V backups for VMs that you are protecting at the guest OS level. Doing so can compromise log truncation changes for applications and lead to other undesirable results.

     For virtualized Active Directory servers, there are additional considerations. See Protecting virtualized Active Directory servers  for details.

     For virtual machines in Distributed File System environments, there are additional considerations. See Protecting virtual machines in Distributed File System environments for details.