DPM 2010 and Hyper-V R2 Clustering

Soldato
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Hi guys,

We've just upgraded to DPM 2010 and a new LTO5 drive (Which is awesome, no more juggling space on the tapes!) and we've decided to try and backup some of our virtual machines as well as the data on them.

We have a 6 node Hyper-V R2 Cluster using Clustered Shared Volumes, DPM 2010 is cluster aware and shows up all the virtual machines perfectly, we're about to do a test VM backup and it all seems like it's going to be fine, however, we do have one question we can't seem to find the answer to:

How do we back up the cluster configuration itself? There doesn't appear to be an option for it. We're assuming at the minute that backing up the system state on each node will do the job, but we'd like some reassurance that this is the case. The documentation on it is decidedly lacking!

Any help would be grand.
 
We're using DPM2010 too, but we've not backed up a whole VM from the outside so I'm not sure, but have you tried asking on the DPM technet forums? As they've just updated them.

I'd post the link but I'm not sure if it's against the rules or not.
 
Hi, on a slightly unrelated note....

When you say Hyper V R2 do you mean Hyper V 2.0 or Hyper V 1 but R2 ?

Sorry for the slight tangent.....

Im VMware through and through at the moment, and would like to get into Hyper V, but from what Ive dabbled with and learnt so far, it seems Hyper V1 is a waste of time, but Hyper V 2 is the one thats starting to get somewhere.

In addition, is the Host Clustering in Hyper V2 separate to actual Server 2008R2 OS clustering or is it somewhow integrated between the two?

Hmmm... Maybe I should start a new thread... let me know if you would rather I did, and I shall.
 
Im VMware through and through at the moment, and would like to get into Hyper V, but from what Ive dabbled with and learnt so far, it seems Hyper V1 is a waste of time, but Hyper V 2 is the one thats starting to get somewhere.

In addition, is the Host Clustering in Hyper V2 separate to actual Server 2008R2 OS clustering or is it somewhow integrated between the two?

AFAIK the underlying structure of Hyper-V is VERY similar to Server Core, which would mean that the clustering is the same as with Server 2008, using the cluster config wizard setting up CSVs etc.

Put it this way... have spent the last 2 weeks doing this, it's nowhere near as simple as it was with VMware.
 
it's Hyper-V 2.

I found clustering it to be very simple. You just attach the SAN storage to each node, attach the volumes you want to use for Clustered Shared Volumes and the quorum, then take them offline. Make sure the Hyper-V role is installed and you have your virtual networks setup identically accross all the nodes, then go into Failover Cluster Manager and create the cluster, the wizard does all the work for you (Creating the Clustered Shared Volumes, selecting the quorum disk, setting up the clustered networks etc).

After you've done that you can make VMs "highly available" which allows for things like live migration between nodes and the like. Essentially the Virtual Machines are cluster aware while the hyper-v role itself isn't. If a node goes down, the Virtual machine will move itself to another node.

It also means you can have virtual machines on a node which aren't highly available if you want to, although I'm not sure why you would do that, unless you wanted it to run from local disks on one of the nodes or something, or had a special network configuration that used a NIC specific to that node. Stuff like that.

We use System Center Virtual Machine Manager to deploy VMs and manage the cluster, the interface is pretty similar to VMWare V-Sphere, the terminology for things is slightly different, but it's pretty much the same.

I do find deploying VMs to be nicer with Virtual Machine Manager though, as it can do more stuff than V-Sphere without having to resort to obscure answer files.
 
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