Unitrends offers all-in-one backup, replication, archiving, and disaster recovery for Hyper-V virtual infrastructure in an integrated fashion from the Administrator Interface. The Unitrends Hyper-V Host Operating System (HOS) agent leverages the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to offer centralized and efficient protection of hosted virtual machines. The Unitrends appliance can protect VMs in online, offline, and saved states. You must install Hyper-V Integration Services on your VMs to protect them in an online state.
When you add a Hyper-V host to the system, the HOS agent is automatically installed as part of the Windows agent. You can then protect all VMs under that host without having to add individual VMs to the Unitrends backup system. Before adding a host, see Prerequisites for Hyper-V protection to be sure installation prerequisites have been met.
In some instances, you might wish to protect VMs at the guest OS level by installing the appropriate agents, adding them to the appliance as you would add physical machines, and running file-level and/or application backups. For example, if you are running applications such as SQL, Exchange, or SharePoint on a Hyper-V VM, you will have more granular control of database backups and restores if you add these VMs to the appliance and run the relevant application backups. For more information, see Protecting Hyper-V virtual machines at the guest OS level.
Note: To protect a VM with both Hyper-V host-level and file-level (agent-based) backups, ensure that the VM's host-level and file-level jobs do not overlap. Running both simultaneously may lead to undesirable results.
To protect the file system and operating system of the Hyper-V host, you must run file-level backups and use Unitrends bare metal protection. For details, see File-level Backups and Windows Bare Metal Protection. Any files belonging to the Hyper-V application are automatically excluded from file-level backups of the Hyper-V host.
It is recommended that you read Best practices for protecting Hyper-V virtual machines before you begin protecting your Hyper-V environment.