Whitepaper – Planning Hyper-V CSV and Backup

I have just published a guide or document to discus the subject(s) of Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) and backup.

Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced many new features for those of us who use Hyper-V. One of the big ones was something called Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). This allowed us to do something that VMware users take for granted and that we could not do before this release of Windows Server: store many virtual machines, which are running on many hosts in a cluster, on a single storage volume. The benefit of CSV is that it simplifies administration, reduces the possibility of human engineering error, and even makes the private cloud a possibility.

A structure depends on the foundation that it is built upon. The same is true of a virtualisation infrastructure. The foundation of Hyper-V (or XenServer or vSphere) is the storage design and implementation. What appears to be not very well understood is that backup design is intrinsically linked to your storage architecture. One must be considered hand-in-hand with the other in the Hyper-V world. Get that wrong and you’ll have unhappy users, an unhappy boss, and maybe even an unhappy bank manager when you are no longer employed. When you get to grips with the basics you’ll be empowered to implement that ideal virtualisation platform with optimised backup.

This document will cover:

• What is CSV and how does it work?
• How backup works with CSV
• Designing CSV for your compute cluster
• Disaster recovery with multi-site clusters
• “Planning” for the private cloud

The document continues.

Thanks to Altaro for sponsoring this document.