Now that I’ve dealt with backing up and restoring Hyper-V, let’s have a look at that management component, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).
The simplest solution is to simply backup the entire VMM server. But what if it isn’t that simple for you? What if you have a large or distributed environment? How do you recover individual aspects? How do you restore to a different computer?
There’s two aspects to VMM. The library is a shared folder. That’s easy to backup. You just use any old VSS enabled backup tool to backup Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2. But that’s only the library.
What about all the intelligence, i.e. the database? Well, you could just do a SQL backup of the database. That’s one way. VMM also provides a method do backup and recover the database using VMM native tools.
To backup the database you can:
- In Administration view, click General, and then, in the Actions pane, click Back up Virtual Machine Manager.
- In the Virtual Machine Manager Backup dialog box, type the path for a destination folder for the backup file. The folder must not be a root directory and must be accessible to the SQL Server.
That’s a GUI method and not something you’ll be able to do on a schedule reliably. You’ll need a script. VMM is based on PowerShell so with a little PSH you can create a script which you can schedule. Luckily, Microsoft has the script up on TechNet for both VMM 2008 and VMM 2008 R2.
That’s the backup. You’ll need to be able to restore it. There is a tool that is on the DVD that you will need to do the restore. It is not installed on the server. It is called SCVMMRecover.exe and it is located on the DVD at %ROOT%i386bin for a 32-bit computer, or %ROOT%amd64bin for a 64-bit computer. The syntax to run it is:
SCVMMRecover [-Path <location>] [-Confirm]
There are two scenarios for a recovery. If you recover to the same machine, i.e. with the same SID, then you must do some clean up work:
- You must manually remove any hosts that were removed since the backup was done.
- You must manually add any hosts that were added since the backup was done.
- You must manually remove any VM entries for VM’s that were deleted since the backup was done. These VM’s will be listed as "Missing".
If you recover the backup to a different VMM server then you must do some different steps. This is because the computer is not recognised by the virtualisation hosts. Your virtualisation hosts because they will have an "Access Denied" status. You must re-associate those hosts with your new VMM server. Then you can commence with the manual cleanup tasks listed above.
What would I do?
- Ensure you backup all servers hosting VMM roles, ideally including all components on the servers. This will include backing up contents of all VMM libraries.
- Schedule the PowerShell script to also do a VMM native backup of the VMM database. Include the results in your traditional server backups.
With this approach you have options when it comes to a restoration. For example, if you have a complete VMM server failure you can do a traditional restore of all components. But if you lose VMM database you can restore it quickly using the native tools. And if that traditional recovery doesn’t work (for whatever reason), at least you can build a new VMM server and restore the database backup that you did using the VMM PowerShell cmdlets.
Reference: Backing Up and Restoring the VMM Database