New version of Hyper-V will have these features
- New VM Configuration version
- VM Configuration Format to binary format (vmcx file). Prior version in xml format.
- Production checkpoint
Most existing version of backup will implement kernel level file system filter in order to gain efficiency during backup. This has makes it hard for backup vendor to update newer version of Windows Server and increase complexity of Hyper-V deployment.
Therefore, on upcoming Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has built in charge based tracking for backup and production checkpoint. Production checkpoints are point-in-time images of VMs. When producing production checkpoints, Microsoft Hyper-V does not put VMs to the saved state. Instead, it quiesces data on VMs with the help of the Microsoft VSS technology (for Microsoft Windows VMs) or file system freeze (for Linux VMs). The resulting checkpoints are application-consistent, so you can recover VMs without any data loss.
In order for Veeam to perform online backup with the help of production checkpoint, you need to meet these conditions:
- VM have a new format of configuration files (VMCX and VMRS)
- VMs are deployed on the Hyper-V Server 2016 or Nano Server
- Cluster functional level is upgraded for Hyper-V Cluster
Let have a look on our test scenario:
[Test environment]
- Windows Server Hyper-V 2016 TP5
- Veeam Backup and Replication ver9.5 Beta 1
- Import VMs from Windows Server 2012 R2. Guest operating system is Windows Server 2008 R2
Backup completed but with warning message which requested to upgrade our existing VM configuration ver5.1 to latest version.
To upgrade configuration version, you can use Hyper-V Manager. Just right click VM and select Upgrade Configuration Version.
Configuration version upgraded!
Re-run backup job and now Veeam able to backup your VMs without any error message.
Test result:-
That's concluded our test on backup Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V.
