Hypervisor level backup & targeted host
Good afternoon all,
We currently have a situation wherein we have 2 "live" HyperV Hosts and 1 "Replica" Host.
All 3 Hosts have the HyperV agent installed.
We have been backing up with a plan created to capture the VM's on the Replica Host from a Hypervisor level.
Now, in the past we have seen the situation where if one Host is removed, the backup will automatically repoint at the identical VM on a seperate Host (I guess due to the WMI ID being the same on the VM).
My question is twofold:
1. Is there any way of forcing the backup plan to target a specific Host?
2. I have tried turning off the Acronis services on the Host I don't want to back up from and the Host has gone dark on the management portal - but I've lost the ability to manually trigger that backup now - will it automatically repoint at the backup runtime?
Many thanks for your help,
Phil
Hi Maria,
Thanks for your response, I think this may have been posted in the wrong forum? We're using Acronis Cyber Cloud - shall I just repost there or can you move this post?
Kind regards,
Phil
Maria Belinskaya wrote:Hello Phil,
thank you for posting on Acronis forums!
The root cause of the behavior you see is that Acronis Backup identifies (and distinguishes between them) the Hyper-V VMs using WMI ID which is identical for original VM and it's replica created natively by Hyper-V.
In Acronis Backup 12.5 Update 4, there was a new identification method added, which allows handling these scenarios.
If you are already using Update 4 and still experience this issue, please contact Acronis Support Team for further assistance with the issue (the root cause might be different in your case).
Hello Phil,
sorry for the delayed response! I've clarified your question with the dedicated team and here their reply
The main difficulty with Hyper-V replicas stems from the fact that both original and replicated Virtual Machine will have same UUID. For this reason, Acronis Agent for Hyper-V has no way of distinguishing between the original and replicated machines which might cause issues with machine detection.
A new feature that would allow correct identification of Agentless (Agent is not inside VM) virtual machines is in development.
In the meantime, you may want installing the Agent inside the virtual machine that would be replicated and backing it up like any other machine with Agent installed inside of it. This way, there won't be any issues caused by duplicate entries.
Also, generally, in case of clustered VM hosts environment:
VMs might migrate from one node to another for a different reasons (node unavailability, load balancing). Therefore in this case it's recommended to install and Agent for Backup on each node to cover all the VMs hosted on it.
The Agent for Hyper-V is designed in such a way that it uses the information from the installation of Hyper-V.
Within a Clustered environment we need to make sure the Agents for Hyper-V are installed on the nodes and they access the same information using the WMI.