Great features keep on coming, now support for backing up Hyper-V replica

Microsoft keeps on delivering great technologies to their customers, the last contribution is the support for backing up Hyper-V replicated servers.

When building a disaster recovery plan for a customer one important key component is the Hyper-V replica feature that lets you asynchronous replicate a Hyper-V machine between two hosting servers. The only previously supported scenario was to back up the virtual machines running at the primary site, this has now changed. On the 24th of April Microsoft announced that they now support backup of the replicated sever that is located at the replica site, this makes it easier to provide a decent and also a more optimal disaster recovery scenario or strategy to customers.  

 

Please note that backup of a Hyper-V virtual machine should only be considered as a disaster recovery strategy. From a DPM perspective you can recovery items that are defined as flat files from within the backup of the virtual machine, this does not apply to the applications (SQL, Exchange etc.) running inside the virtual machine. To summarize it, to be able to create a basic recover strategy you need to deploy a DPM agent to the virtual machine OS and perform what Microsoft call a guest-level backup providing a recovery scenario for the hosted application.

The Hyper-V replica feature has been a great contribution from Microsoft to their customers and with this announcement of support the efficiency of building a more optimal and strategically disaster recovery plan, which will directly map to the customer business continuity plan, means a great deal.

For more information regarding Hyper-V replica please have a look at this website: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj134172.aspx

For more information regarding the new support please read this article from Neela Syam Kolli that is the Product Group Manager for the DPM team: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2014/04/25/backing-up-of-replica-vms-using-dpm.aspx