Prerequisites for Hyper-V protection

The prerequisites for protecting Hyper-V environments are listed below. Additional requirements must be met for agent push installations and updates. See Push installing the Windows agents and Updating the Windows agents for details.

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Description

Hyper-V host

The following are required for the Hyper-V host:

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The Hyper-V host must be a supported version listed in the Unitrends Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix.

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The Unitrends Windows agent must be installed on the host as described in Windows agent versions. (It is not necessary to install agents on your virtual machines.)

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The Hyper-V host must be added to the Unitrends appliance as a client.

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For cluster configurations, be sure to install the same agent version on all hosts in the cluster.

Microsoft VSS

Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and the Hyper-V VSS writer must be installed and running on the Hyper-V host.

Virtual machine configuration

Host-level protection is supported for VMs that meet the requirements below. For VMs that do not meet these requirements, install the Unitrends agent on the VM and run file-level backups.

VM requirements:

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The VM configuration is 5.0 or earlier. VMs with later configuration versions cannot be protected with host-level backups and do not display in VM inventory in the Unitrends AI.

Notes:

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Starting with VM configuration 6.2, Microsoft implemented a binary-based configuration format (VMCX). Due to this change, different host-level backup and recovery methods are required and will be available in a future Unitrends release.

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To use Unitrends host-level protection, do not create or upgrade a VM to a configuration later than 5.0. Once you upgrade a VM's configuration, it cannot be downgraded to an older configuration.

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On Windows Server 2016, VMs are created by default with the VMCX configuration format. But you can create a configuration 5.0 VM by using PowerShell and the -Version parameter, as described in this Microsoft article: Create a virtual machine in Hyper-V.

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The VM cannot be configured with shared VHDX disks.

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The VM cannot be configured with pass-through disks.

Online backups of a virtual machine

To perform online backups of a virtual machine, you must install Integration Services in the guest operating system. Integration Services enable the virtual machine to create a child state snapshot. The host can then use this snapshot to perform an online backup of the virtual machine. To determine which guest operating systems support Integration Services and online backups, refer to the Microsoft document Hyper-V Overview.