Hyper-V virtual machine backup at CPS scale

As the adoption of Hyper-V picked up in the enterprise segment, there has been a focused effort to provide best-in-class support for protecting Hyper-V VMs. These features started with the System Center 2012 R2 release and subsequent update rollups aligned with the Windows Server 2012 R2 releases. With these features, DPM is the most performant, robust, and scalable Hyper-V VM backup solution in the market currently. These are some of the key features:

 Leverages Hyper-V native VHD snapshots in concert with the host-level VSS infrastructure to reduce the overall impact on the system and provide efficient backups for VMs.

 Certified to protect a fully provisioned CPS “stamp” consisting of four racks, 8,000 VMs, and 32 DPM servers with a daily VM backup at a backup SLA goal of 99 percent. (Backup SLA implies one successful daily recovery point for every VM in CPS.)

 Support for running DPM in a virtualized environment. DPM supports a scale-out architecture, which requires deployment of multiple DPM servers to handle large-scale DPM deployments. Having the ability to run them virtualized was a key enabler for this. Some of the large DPM deployments have over 100 DPM servers in a single datacenter deployment.

 Automated provisioning, management, and monitoring for managing the VM backup process in a hosted environment for CPS. These were released as Windows PowerShell-based runbooks customized for the CPS deployment and currently only available as part of CPS. It is on the roadmap to release them for a non-CPS Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V environment.

 Support for scale-out file server (SOFS) that uses storage spaces and just a bunch of disks (JBOD) to create low-cost storage alternatives, ideal for deploying as backup storage.

 Support for file-consistent backup of Linux guests running on Hyper-V without needing to take them offline. Service providers typically run a combination of Windows and Linux guest operating systems, so providing a consistent and uniform backup policy is essential.

 Ability to specify backup and consistency-checking time windows to provide backup administrators more control of the backup process.

Source of Information : Microsoft System Center