SUMMARY
Protection of Pass-through disks on Hyper-v or VMware
ISSUE
Purpose
Describe the process for protecting Pass-Through disks in VMWare or HyperV environments.
Description
In a virtual machine, disks are most commonly locally attached or SAN storage presented and managed by the hypervisor itself to the guest operating system through the guest OS configuration and settings. However, in some cases, the guest itself manages remotely attached storage or USB connected volumes as part of its own storage. This may include iSCSI maps to network shares or mounted NAS volumes that are not part of the hypervisor’s directly managed storage.
Cause
Because the mounted resource is not visible to the hypervisor, only the guest OS is aware of that connectivity. That means that Unitrends App Aware backups of the VM guest through connection to the hypervisor would also not be aware of that storage, and would not protect it.
Resolution
In these cases, where storage has been configured inside the guest OS instead of inside the hypervisor, known commonly as pass-through storage, the guest machine will have to be backed up using the Agent method and cannot be properly protected using the hypervisor aware backup.
To do this, Exclude the machine from VMWare or HyperV backups, and configure the guest machine as you would a physical machine by installing and registering an agent to the client OS for backup, and managing the system as if it was a physical server by including it in traditional backup schedules.