SUMMARY
Hyper-V 2012 Support Considerations
ISSUE
Purpose
This article is intended to discuss known software defects in Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 related to Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), and Microsoft’s supported/recommended configurations and patches required to allow successful 3rd party backups of Hyper-V 2012 systems that utilize CSV. Additionally, this article includes information necessary to ensure the default “system” writer is used when backing up Hyper-V guests using the Unitrends Agent.
The attached article below includes information detailing required hotfixes for Windows Server 2012 Core from Microsoft, and installation steps. Also included are numerous links to Microsoft resources covering Hyper-V 2012 deployment best practices and networking requirements for CSV as well as numerous diagnostic tools, checklists, and configuration management information as it related to Hyper-V backups.
In addition to the attached article, the following information is supported as of release 7.3:
- For stand-alone Hyper-V servers, backups are executed simultaneously. The number of jobs that run simultaneously is determined by the Maximum Concurrent Backups setting (Settings > Storage and Retention > Backup Devices) and the resource load of the system. It is also important to monitor the resource utilization on the Hyper-V server to determine whether its backups should be staggered.
- If multiple virtual machines in a clustered environment (CSV) are running on Windows 2012 R2, backups are executed simultaneously.
- If multiple virtual machines in a clustered environment (CSV) are running on a version of Windows that is older than 2012 R2, the system serializes the backups. Jobs are queued but run one at a time. This is a Windows limitation.