Windows Virtualization Team Blog : volume snapshot

Re-blog: Microsoft Site Recovery Solution Launch

porourke — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:27:00 GMT

I'm re-blogging here. Over at Virt Planet blog, Jim wrote the following:

This week Microsoft is launching a comprehensive solution to help customers implement cost effective, end-to-end site recovery programs. Built on proven capabilities in Windows Server 2008 R2 and the System Center management suite, Microsoft is helping IT Professionals leverage Windows Server Hyper-V and Failover Clustering along with tools like Virtual Machine Manager to deliver cost effective site recovery.

The Microsoft Site Recovery Solution ecosystem is ramping with a broad range of storage replication partners like Double-Take Software, EMC, HDS, HP delivering solutions that take advantage of the Microsoft Cluster Resource DLL. With cluster integration IT Professionals can deploy streamlined and operationally effective site recovery.

You can learn more about the Microsoft Site Recovery Solution by joining the Microsoft team and Enterprise Strategy Group on Thursday, November 5^th at 10:30am Pacific for a webcast Building Effective and Highly Available Disaster Recovery Solutions Using Microsoft Virtualization This webcast looks at key drivers for site recovery solutions and reviews practical deployment considerations (you can view the recorded version of the webcast after the 5^th). Microsoft and select partners will also be demonstrating Site Recovery Solutions at TechEd, so if you plan to be in Berlin during the week of November 9^th, make sure to stop by the Virtualization Solutions kiosk in the Technical Learning Center.

Patrick

Upcoming Webcasts on Best Practices for Virtualizing MS Server Applications

porourke — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:25:00 GMT

We’ve got some great webcasts coming up in the next few weeks to discuss recommendations for virtualizing MS server applications and the benefits of choosing hyper-V + System Center as your virtualization solution. Each technical webcast will focus on a specific server application- Exchange, SQL and SharePoint. Please see below for detailed information.

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for SQL Server (Level 300). Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009 at 10am Pacific time

Virtualizing business critical applications will deliver significant customer benefits including cost savings, enhanced business continuity and an agile and efficient management solution. This session will focus on virtualizing SQL Server using Microsoft solutions, the benefits over key competitors such as VMware, and guidance for virtualizing SQL server for Production and Test/Dev scenarios focusing on consolidation, scale, load balancing, dynamic provisioning and high availability. We will go into technical details with best practices. Customer evidence and results from lab deployment tests will also be discussed.

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for Exchange Server (Level 300) Wednesday, Nov. 4 at 10am Pacific time

Virtualizing business critical applications will deliver significant customer benefits including cost savings, enhanced business continuity and an agile and efficient management solution. This session will focus on virtualizing Exchange using Microsoft solutions, the benefits over key competitors such as VMware, and guidance for virtualizing Exchange for various Production scenarios. We will go into technical details with best practices. Customer evidence and results from lab deployment tests will also be discussed.

Trying to achieve granularity of backups with the Hyper-V VSS Writer

SoumyaDB — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 08:36:00 GMT

Another area of feedback on the Hyper-V VSS Writer is that it does not give much by way of granularity beyond the level of the virtual machine. As a result of that, backup applications are stuck to backing up the entire VHD file, which could easily end up being a rather onerous process, expesially if the administrator is backing up to a separate DR site.

To work around this, backup vendors have been looking into solutions for browsing/indexing the files in the in the VHD file. In general, the user can mount the VHD as another drive on the host and browse its file system. The way to do this is not available via the UI in Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, but is available via the WMI API. Ben Armstrong has a blog post on doing that via vbscript/powershell over here. Given this avenue, the first approach is to follow the following steps:

1. Create VSS snapshot of that involves the VM

2. Mount the VSS snapshot as a volume on the host

3. Get the VHD residing in the VSS snapshot

4. Mount the VHD as drive on the physical machine

5. Go to town on the files residing in the VHD.

Problem with the steps above is that #4 fails due to the fact that the snapshot volume is a read-only volume and the WMI API for mounting VHDs tries to mount it in RW mode. So, we add a step 3a to the sequence and modify step 4 slightly. Here is the updated sequence:

1. Create VSS snapshot of that involves the VM

2. Mount the snapshot as a volume on the host

3. Get the VHD residing in the VSS snapshot

3a. Create a differencing disk on a physical volume with the VHD in the VSS snapshot as the parent disk

4. Mount the VHD created above as drive on the physical machine

5. Go to town on the files residing in the VHD.

since the differencing disk sits on a RW volume, the Mount API will succeed, while keeping the VHD in the snapshot unaffected. The backup application can now browse/index the files inside volume residing in the VHD at will and allow for a more granular and thus optimized backup experience for the user.

There are some important caveats to keep in mind about this approach:

1. While this approach allows for granular backup of specific files inside a virtual machine, the onus for ensuring the right files are available upon restore rests on the backup application as well. So, the backup application will need to do a similar process of mounting the VHD and copying down the right files during the restore process.

2. If the virtual machine in question has snapshots, this approach is not possible in v1 it is not possible for a user or a third-party application to create a differencing disk off a snapshot VHD file (ie: a .avhd file). If the virtual machine has snapshots, the backup application will need to copy the VHD and avhd files to RW media before mounting the avhd files in the physical machine. Additionally, the backup application will need to know the latest snapshot in the snapshot tree.