Hyper-V, Microsoft's virtualization platform, remains a significant player in the virtualization market, competing with other major platforms. It is widely adopted due to its integration with Windows Server, cost-effectiveness, and robust feature set.
With many planning to adopt Hyper-V, there are questions on how to protect virtual machines and address core challenges, such as
- Achieving the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which entails maintaining three copies of data on two different media, with one copy stored off-site.
- Ensuring the integrity and consistency of backups across different media and locations, which requires rigorous monitoring and management.
- Substantial cost associated with maintaining multiple copies of data and off-site storage .
- Meeting the recovery time objective (RTO) with fast and reliable recovery process
- Ransomware can target backup files, rendering them useless. Ensuring backups are immutable and isolated from the production environment is a vital.
NetApp Backup and Recovery for Hyper-V, accessible from NetApp Console, can help to overcome these challenges effectively while also improving operational efficiency.
NetApp Backup and Recovery for Hyper-V is currently in private preview and supports standalone or failover cluster VM setup over SMB. Following are the supported features:
- 3-2-1 backup architecture to backup snapshots to secondary ONTAP cluster and/or to object store(AWS S3, Azure blob, StorageGrid, ONTAP S3)
- Virtual machine backup and restore from ONTAP or from object store
- Protect VMs with tamperproof snapshots or DataLocking on object store
Here are the prerequisite before configuring the Hyper-V VM backup.
- Sign up to access Hyper-V protection service by filling up this form
- Deploy NetApp Agent as given in the documentation and create organization
- Grant "Backup and Recovery super admin" access in NetApp Console-> Administration->Identity and access
- Install following features on Hyper-V server
- 8144 (NetApp Plug-in for Hyper-V)
- 8145 (NetApp Plug-in for Windows)
- Powershell 7.4.2 or later
- ASP.Net Core Runtime 8.0.12 Hosting Bundle
- Ensure Host Guardian Service Role is installed
- Ensure two-way HTTPS traffic is allowed for the following ports in Windows Firewall settings
Add the ONTAP cluster in NetApp->Storage-> Management which host all the VM virtual disk
From the NetApp Console go to left pane and click Protection -> Backup and Recovery. Select Hyper-V workload. First time users will be asked to enter the Hyper-V server details like server ip, credentials to connect to the server, port & path to install lightweight plugin
NetApp Backup and Recovery will automatically discover the virtual machines running in the Hyper-V environment. The first step to protect Hyper-V is to configure policy to set the backup strategy like (disk to disk , disk to object store, disk to disk to object store etc..) , schedule, frequency of backup across primary and secondary and enable snapshot locking.
VM's can be protected separately or in a group by creating protection group. Assuming all VM's need to be backed up together, create a protection group and add VM's to the protection group.
Add policy to the protection group and review the configuration.
Backup is configured for group of VM's. You can run on-demand backup on need basis.
Here is the result for the VM protection details after running the backup multiple times. The location column in the screenshot shows the location of saved snapshots. If the icon is blue, it indicates the snapshots are saved in primary ONTAP cluster, secondary ONTAP cluster and the object store.
Accidentally or intentionally, if an application gets deleted from a VM, the restore process is straightforward. You can easily browse through the VM list on the restore page and click restore.
Select the snapshot to recover the VM and initiate restore operation.
Select the location of the backup from where the VM must be restored.
Optionally, check the box if the VM need to be started post-restore.
Once the restore is done, verify the application setup is restored and the application works fine as usual.
Summary & Call to action:
NetApp Backup and Recovery configures and orchestrates the protection of Hyper-V virtual machines, thus simplifying the process and reducing the operational challenges of backup infrastructure. To know more about NetApp Backup and Recovery, check the documentation. NetApp Backup and Recovery is currently in private preview mode. Sign up by filling up the form to explore the functionality and share the feedback or queries with us at ng-backupservice-feedback@netapp.com.
Similar protection capabilities are available for other enterprise workloads and detailed blogs for each workload are as follows:
