Hyper-V R2 Can Give You Backup / Recovery Options You Never Had Before!
Times are tough, and belts are tight. Many companies have looked to server virtualization to reduce costs through hardware consolidation. Cutting costs by combining server instances onto fewer physical systems can reduce costs, but could you do more? Are you squeezing the right cost without putting your organization at risk?
Could you actually save more with less?
I speak with lots of customers about cost cutting and virtualization. I’m always interested in how they manage their virtual environment, and often dig into their operational procedures and practices. Yes you’ve heard that Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 includes Live Migration - providing continuous application availability during planned failovers for virtual machines. Live Migration and Quick Migration are fantastic availability features of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V, but not all servers or applications require this level of availability.
If you’ve purchased VMware, you likely know about VMotion, a similar capability to Live Migration. Do you use VMotion for all (or any) of your systems? For all the hype of these marquee availability features, organizations simply do not use them for many (if any) VMs. Perhaps the cost of shared storage is too high to facilitate failover clustering, or the level of complexity is too much for administrators in remote branch offices. Added expense and complexity are at odds with the cost drivers pushing consolidation through virtualization.
Most individual production servers require some ability to be recovered from a failure. Regardless of your virtualization method (VMware, Hyper-V, or other) or your use of planned failover tools (Live Migration, VMotion, or other), you still likely need to backup and recover the VMs and the data they serve / process.
How do you backup and restore your VMs? Are you doing it the most efficient way?
Do you leverage the same agents inside VMs you use on physical systems? Lots of companies charged down the “virtualize to consolidate” path without altering their backup and recover processes. Many companies still backup VMs using agents inside the virtual machines. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, and it may even be unavoidable in some situations. The problem is that backing up the same old way means these companies are still buying the same expensive backup agents for each VM. It also means they need to rebuild a VM to recover (it in much the same way as an old physical server). Savings realized through server consolidation can be substantial, but without adjusting your operational methods, benefits are limited!
Why not take advantage of the encapsulation of server instances to improve disaster recovery? VMs live in files, why not backup and restore the few number of files that represent a VM, rather than be forced to reconstruct VMs to recover them?
Consolidated Backup and Recovery of VMs is Part of Windows!
Did you know that everything you need to do a Hyper-V backup is included in Windows Server? There are at least two ways to make complete, consistent backups of VMs on Hyper-V that can be quickly and easily restored without purchasing additional backup software. Because VM files exist on top of a Windows file system, they can be accessed by all the same backup and recovery tools you already know and use, leveraging the integrated snapshot capability of the Volume Shadow Copy Service . If you don’t want to use an external backup and recovery product you can use the integrated Windows Server Backup utility (WSB) or write your own custom process to make snapshots using diskshadow and xcopy. For an even better backup and recovery solution, you can checkout System Center Data Protection Manager which enables you to snapshot and backup your VMs (for example) ever 15 minutes efficiently over the network.
VMware Backup Costs Extra, and You Still Need 3rd Party Tools!
Yes, you could do something similar with VMware – they offer VMware Consolidated Backup to backup a VMware host and the hosted / encapsulated virtual machines, but just like VMotion, it is by no means a low cost backup solution. It still requires a VMware 3rd party backup solution as well as the extra cost of VMware’s tools. Even with all that, it’s not a simple process to get it working.
Simplify Your Linux / UNIX Backups with Windows?
What sort of support do you have for some of the vintage UNIX systems or those few (perhaps) mysterious Linux systems in the corner of your computer room? If you are primarily a Windows administrator, how long might it take you to rebuild those systems and reload / reconfigure the applications they host? What if the “Y2K Compliant” hardware on which those dinosaurs run were to fail? Could you even find the install floppies or a drive to load them? Microsoft doesn’t provide much in the way of support for Linux or UNIX operating systems – it’s not our business. Even with that, because they can be virtualized on Hyper-V, you can make reliable backups of these non-Windows operating systems using the same integrated, low cost tools and capabilities. I walked through the details of how this all works on my personal blog here using an instance of Hannah Montana Linux for fun. This distribution is of course not supported by Microsoft on Hyper-V, but the process works perfectly. Microsoft does have support arrangements with two of the large commercial Linux distribution vendors (Red Hat and Novell), but there are hundreds of Linux distributions and lots of other non-Microsoft operating systems out in the world. While Microsoft doesn’t provide support for UNIX on Hyper-V (just like with all those unsupported Linux distributions), there are versions that work, including Open Solaris, SCO UNIX, and every Linux distribution I’ve tried:
Open Solaris 5.11
SCO OpenServer 5.0.7
Unsupported (by Microsoft) Linux
Even without support from Microsoft, I can snapshot, backup, and recover single processor versions of these operating systems on Hyper-V simply and efficiently, just like I can my supported Windows VMs. Can you do that with physical instances of all your servers? Can you do it as cheaply and efficiently on other virtualization platform?
Don’t Just Consolidate with Virtualization – Modernize With Hyper-V
Backup is just one example of how you can save using the virtualization capabilities integrated in Windows Server to make your operations more efficient. Take a look at the efficiency of your entire IT infrastructure as you approach your virtualization projects. Review your investments in hardware, software, management tools, personnel, training and understand the impact of your move to virtualize and where you can drive out the most cost and get the most benefit. For more details on the integrated backup and recovery capabilities Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V, check out my personal blog.
-John
