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Looking for recommendation on doing backup of Hyper-V Host to decrease time to recovery. Normally if you rebuild a Windows Server you could be up to several hours of just windows patching then tracking down drivers etc. I want to be able to bring a Hyper-V host back online in a short period of time.

Goal to be able to recovery a Hyper-V Server should disaster hit. Please note that I am not looking to recover the Guest VM’s but the Hyper-V Host Server. I have lots of protection groups setup for the individual Guest VM’s as need for retention but I am looking at reducing the time required to bring a Hyper-V host back online should a corruption occur with a windows patch etc.

Plan:

Backup All Volumns

Expand HyperV and select Initial Store

System Protection

But I need to exclude the VM’s that are already covered or I am just wasting space on my Backup System. I was going to just exclude all .VHD files but then I noticed the .BIN files which looks to be the size of RAM in use by the individual Guest VM. If I exclude .BIN files that I am going to miss files from the c:\windows directory.

Looking for suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

4 Spice ups
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DPM is a backup & recovery solution. The main thing is that DPM has to fully recover from backup storage, so recovery time depends on the size and network bandwidth.

If you need to reduce downtime, take a look at a third-party solution that provides:

  1. Replication
  2. Instant VM Recovery

For example, DPM and Veeam Backup supporting Hyper-V can perfectly complement each other.

1 Spice up
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Thanks for the reply but I am trying to determine what I need to select on the host server when using DPM as my backup solution so that I can successfully do a disaster recovery of my Hyper-V host server from my current DPM solution. When reading the docs they all talk about backup / restore Guest but they do not go into details on how to recover the host server and what to exclude on the guest vm’s. I need to backup the folder structure that the VM’s are in so that I get all of the correct security settings but I want to exclude the VHD files since they are in different protection groups already.

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Samual, what version of DPM do you use?

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I am using Dpm 2012