Should I Backup My Hyper-V Host? – Part 1
There are numerous campaigns circulating the internet these days on the merits and best practices dealing with data protection and virtualized environments. While there are tons of products and tools readily available to help protect your Hyper-V guest VMs, none address the issue or offer a product to protect your Hyper-V hosts.
I’ve heard propaganda from some of these camps minimizing the necessity to protect your host servers, and I respectfully and whole-heartedly disagree with this position. Let us explore areas where you are exposed to corruption and physical server failure if you chose to not protect your Hyper-V hosts.
Configuration
Configuration of your Hyper-V host server is something you likely have researched and spent quite a bit of time implementing. You may have invested in setting up:
- Roles, features and permissions
- SOFS and CSVs for VHD(X) storage
- Complex and maybe even redundant networking and virtual switches
- Integration with active directory and domain services
So now suppose you are ONLY protecting your VMs with your virtual-only backup software. One of your Hyper-V hosts crashes. Do you have documentation of the steps required to manually recreate the configuration you implemented earlier? Are your business operations, your internal customers, and your senior management able to wait patiently while you re-implement? Any of us who have chosen to make our careers in Information Technology know the answers to these questions. And not having a reliable and expedient solution to getting your servers back up and operational can cost you your job.
