Hi there, 1st post & it doesn't appear to be a duplicate (or at least a search revealed nothing) :)
I'm looking for the simplest solution to schedule automatic backups of the VHDX files of my VMs. Currently I'm just manually copying the folder once a week but it would be nice to run this automatically.
OS: Win10
Hyper-V
5 VMs
I use Macrium Reflect to backup all of my VM's and send them to my NAS storage unit. I currently do not have it scheduled, but you can eaisly get M.R. to do it on a scheduled basis.
Welcome to TenForums!
Since a VHDX is just another file, any backup can potentially backup this file, but there are a few considerations:
A VHDX file can potentially be very large, so doing a backup of the whole file can take a while and occupy a lot of storage space if you are saving multiple copies (such as when doing daily, weekly, etc. backups).
For that reason, you might want to consider placing your VHDX files on a seperate volume and then using a backup program such as Macrium Reflect that can perform an image backup of the volume. Since such images are done at the block level, on an incremental or differential backup it will not need to copy the entire VHDX file every time, only those blocks that have changed. That can conserve a lot of space and make the backup a whole lot faster.
There is still one question for me, and I will research this and get back to you:
If you were doing a standard file backup of a VHDX file, you would want to make sure that the VHDX was not in use while you back it up. The problem is that if data is "in-flight" and not yet flushed to disk in a VHDX, you may have a backup with a VHDX in an inconsistent state. With a disk image based backup, a VSS snapshot is first created. A number of apps such as Exchange, SQL Server, etc. are VSS aware and will pause and flush all data that is "in flight" before the snapshot is created guaranteeing that a crash-consistent backup is created. I don't know for sure if Hyper-V in Windows 10 behaves this way as well, although I would suspect that it does. I'll research this and let you know what I find, unless someone else can comment on that.
Welcome to Ten Forums flapinux
You don't want to just back up the vhdx files, that is not sufficient to recreate a VM to include its machine ID (essential if you want to preserve W10 activation for a VM). For a full backup of a Hyper-V VM you would need to export the VM in Hyper-V Manager. There is no scheduling option in the Hyper-V Manager, bu it would seem it is possible to create a Powershell scrit and schedule that.
https://social.technet.microsoft.com...inserverhyperv
However, I don't do any of that. I make regular Macrium Reflect images of my host machine, which of course means that all its VMs are part of that image. And Macrium Reflect does include scheduling options, even in Macrium Reflect Free.
Okay, it's confirmed now - Hyper-V is VSS aware. So that is another good reason to use a disk image backup program such as Macrium Reflect since it will backup the Hyper-V VM in a consistent state.
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