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Hyper-V host-level or VM-level backup

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I have Windows 2012 R2 Server with Hyper-V Role and Acronis Backup 12 Agent for Hyper-V installed.

In Acronis web console I see Hyper-V host and all virtual machines, and can apply backup plan to them.

But I can't find any info in admins's manual or KB articles about difference between host-level or VM-level backup.

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Hi,

The general difference between these 2 backup approaches (backup at hypervisor level and backup at guest OS level) can be found in v11.7 documentation and this info is fully applicable to v12 (since general concept is the same across all versions): http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/AcronisBackup_11.7/index.html#11805.html. Overall it's recommended to stick to hypervisor-level backups since with this approach you eliminate necessity to maintain the agents installation inside the VMs + the process of VM recovery is streamlined. In case you back up at guest OS level, upon recovery you will have to re-create the VM manually and perform recovery via bootable media which is not very convenient, while with hypervisor-level backups you can restore them directly as VMs to the same or different platform (from Hyper-V to VMware ESXi for example). Also you can perform granular files/folders recovery from both types of backups - hypervisor-level and guest OS-level.

If you have only Agent for Hyper-V installed then all VMs backups will be done on hypervisor level, e.g. by capturing VSS snapshot of the underlying VM storage and reading the .vhd/configuration files from these snapshots.

Note that if you install Agent for Windows onto the host then you will be able to back up the Hyper-V host itself, but you won't be able to restore separate VMs from such backups (for this purpose VMs should be backed up separately via Agent for Hyper-V) - you will be only able to recover separate VM files (.vhd/configuration) + obviously entire host local disks/volumes (including recovery to dissimilar hardware).

Thank you.

Hi,

just wanted to get clarification how this (clustered) is working in Backup 12.5.
It seems that when backing up node it will backup also all VM's. Is this how it should be?
Also if backup only VM it seems to backup node also (or part of it).
I didn't find clarification to this process.

So question derived from this: is it enought to only backup node or do every VM need their own backup job also?
And if I only want to backup node and not VM's how is this done? Example in case of disk fail/change and restore node OS only..