SMHV and distributed backup

azhukovamt — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 23:21:24 GMT

Gents,

Can anyone shed a light to the following questions.

SMHV 2.1, Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V cluster, two nodes.

Two CSV volumes: one for VMs, another for Snapinfo.

I enabled distributed [application consistent] backup in the backup policy settings.

There is only a few words about distributed backup in the SMHV guide:

The distributed application-consistent backup feature enables multiple VMs running on

the partner cluster nodes to be consistent in a single hardware Snapshot copy made from the backup

node. This feature is supported for all the VMs running on a CSV 2.0 Windows volume across

multiple nodes in a Windows Failover Cluster. To use this feature, select the Applicationconsistent

backup type and select the Enable Distributed Backup check box.

As I can see, SMHV created a scheduled backup job on each cluster node.

My question: How can I run a backup job manually ? Where it should be started ? Which node ?

We use post-backup script which saves $VMSnapshot in the text file.

Where post-backup script will be started if we use distributed backup ? On both nodes ?

Why Reports are located on only one node ? How should my script recognize, where is located the latest report ?

Thanks

Re: SMHV and distributed backup

dmauro — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 06:40:09 GMT

Hi,

you can use the 'New-Backup' command let in order to launch a new backup manually or with a script.

You can also manually kick off a windows scheduled task manually or via a script.

The job should start from the cluster's quorum owner.

how to find it out: In Windows 2008, you open cmd and type "cluster group" and check who owns the cluster group.

Similarly, in Windows 2012, you open a powershell with administrative priviledges and type: "get-clustergroup" and check who owns the cluster group.

with scripts, you can extract the node name from the output and launch the script on that node.

hope that helps,

Domenico