During its October 13 webinar, KiwiBackup covered the main challenges of backing up Hyper-V virtual machines, the best practices to adopt and the capabilities offered by its solution. The replay is available at the bottom of this article.
Virtualization plays a central role in the IT infrastructures of SMBs and mid-sized companies. Microsoft Hyper-V makes it possible to run several virtual machines on a single physical server, but this pooling of resources does not remove the need for an appropriate backup strategy.
Cyberattacks, accidental deletions, data corruption or hardware failures can make a virtual machine unavailable and disrupt the company's operations.
How can you guarantee the restoration of a critical VM in the event of an incident? That is the question at the heart of this webinar dedicated to backing up and restoring Hyper-V environments.
Snapshot vs. backup: understanding the difference
One of the topics covered during the webinar is the distinction between snapshots, also called checkpoints in Hyper-V, and backups.
These two mechanisms meet different needs. Checkpoints make it possible to revert a virtual machine to an earlier state, for example after a change. However, they are not an independent backup and do not replace an appropriate protection strategy.
In the event of ransomware, hardware failure or infrastructure compromise, having backups that are separate from the production environment is essential to be able to restore data.
It is therefore important to understand the role of each mechanism and to verify that the strategy in place meets the company's restore needs.
What are the best practices for backing up Hyper-V VMs?
An effective backup strategy relies on several complementary principles:
Automate backups: reduce oversights and ensure operations run regularly;
Monitor jobs: identify failures and verify that backups run correctly;
Store backups offsite: keep a copy separate from the production environment to limit the consequences of a local incident;
Define a retention policy: keep a history suited to business needs;
Test restores: verify that backed-up data can actually be recovered.
These practices must be adapted to the criticality of the virtual machines, the business recovery objectives and the constraints of each infrastructure.
Demo: backing up and restoring a Hyper-V VM with KiwiBackup
The webinar includes a demonstration of how KiwiBackup backs up Hyper-V virtual machines.
Participants can discover the main steps of the process:
Connecting to the hypervisor: using the Hyper-V API to detect and list virtual machines;
Hot backup: performing backups while the VMs keep running;
Data transfer: streaming disk images and sending them offsite to the backup infrastructure;
Restore: using the dedicated interface to recover backed-up data.
Hot backup makes it possible to perform the operation without stopping the virtual machines, preserving service continuity during the backup.
The webinar also covers granular restore, which makes it possible to recover a specific file inside a virtual machine without necessarily restoring the entire VM.
Who is this Hyper-V backup webinar for?
This replay is mainly intended for professionals who administer, operate or sell virtualized infrastructures:
CIOs and IT managers;
System and network administrators;
MSPs and managed service providers;
IT resellers and integrators.
It helps you better understand the challenges of Hyper-V backup, identify the best practices to implement and see in concrete terms how a backup solution suited to virtual machines works.
Webinar replay: how to back up your Hyper-V VMs?
Were you unable to attend our October 13 webinar, or would you like to review some of the points covered during the presentation?
Watch the replay below for our speakers' explanations, backup best practices and the demonstration of KiwiBackup on Hyper-V.
Conclusion: prepare for restoration before the incident
Virtualization simplifies the management of IT infrastructures, but it does not by itself guarantee data availability. An appropriate backup strategy must provide usable copies and make it possible to restore virtual machines when needed.
By combining automation, monitoring, offsite storage and restore testing, companies strengthen their ability to deal with incidents and limit their impact on operations.
To learn more, find out in the replay how KiwiBackup backs up and restores Hyper-V virtual machines.