This section provides a list of best practices for protecting your Hyper-V virtual machines.
| • | Follow Microsoft’s best practices for virtualization. For a list of Microsoft documents on virtualization, see Microsoft Virtualization: Hyper-V best practices. |
| • | Install the latest version of Integration Services on all supported operating systems to ensure that the Unitrends appliance can run online backups of your Hyper-V VMs. For more information, see Online backups. |
| • | After making any configuration changes to a VM in the Hyper-V manager, such as creating or deleting a snapshot, adding a new disk, or converting a disk from VHD to VHDX format, you must run a new full backup to ensure the integrity of the VM’s backup groups. After running a new full back up, you can continue protecting the VM with its existing schedule. |
| • | A cluster with a single cluster shared volume does not follow Microsoft’s best practices and may be unreliable. If you have VMs in a cluster with a single CSV, protect them as if they are physical machines. For details, see Protecting Hyper-V virtual machines at the guest OS level. |
| • | In some instances, it is recommended that you protect Hyper-V VMs at the guest OS level and protect them the same way you would protect physical machines. For details, see Protecting Hyper-V virtual machines at the guest OS level. |
| • | 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. |
| • | For virtualized Active Directory servers, there are additional considerations. See Protecting virtualized Active Directory servers for details. |
| • | For virtual machines in Distributed File System environments, there are additional considerations. See Protecting virtual machines in Distributed File System environments for details. |