Backing Up Virtual Machines

Table Of Contents

When backing up a Hyper-V 3.0 virtual machine, Agent for Hyper-V backs up the machine's PVLAN

settings. The agent recovers these settings when recovering the machine to a new or existing

machine on the same host.

When recovering the machine to a different host, the agent clears the PVLAN settings for the

recovered machine.

Virtual Fibre Channel HBAs

Virtual Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) enable each virtual machine to access a Fibre Channel

storage as if the machine had an individual Fibre Channel connection. For example, you can configure

a virtual machine to access only a specific logical unit number (LUN) of a Storage Area Network (SAN),

rather than all of the LUNs available to the Hyper-V host.

Although Agent for Hyper-V can back up virtual machines that have HBAs, it cannot back up the

contents of the storage itself. If you have to back up this storage directly from the virtual machine,

install Agent for Windows into the guest operating system.

3.6 Backing up Linux logical volumes and MD devices

Acronis Backup can back up virtual machines that have logical volumes (also known as LVM volumes)

or MD devices (also known as Linux Software RAID).

You can choose between backing up these machines at a hypervisor level (by using Agent for

VMware or Agent for Hyper-V) or by installing Agent for Linux inside the guest operating system.

Backing up at a hypervisor level

This is your natural choice if you back up entire machines and recover them onto the same platform

(ESX(i) or Hyper-V). You do not need to install multiple agents or create bootable media in this case.

Since Agent for VMware or Agent for Hyper-V cannot access the file system of a logical volume or MD

device, they back up the underlying disks or partitions sector-by-sector. Non-LVM volumes are

backed up in the normal mode, by backing up their file systems. All backed up data can be recovered

back to the original place without any problem.

Limitations

Sector-by-sector backup of logical volumes results in the following limitations:

 If the root directory is located on a logical volume, the system may fail to boot after recovery to

hardware or to a different platform (ESX(i) or Hyper-V). Please be aware of this, since recent

Linux distributions, such as Fedora or RHEL, place the root directory on a logical volume by

default. Use the Acronis Universal Restore tool to make the recovered system bootable.

 When creating a backup plan, you cannot select a logical volume or MD device. Select either the

entire machine or all of the partitions that make up the volume group or device.

 File backup and file recovery from a disk-level backup are not possible for files located on logical

volumes and MD devices.

 Resizing of a logical volume during recovery is not possible.

The common limitation of hypervisor-level backup is that you cannot execute pre/post backup or

pre/post data capture commands within the guest operating system.