Some time ago I received a license from my sponsor Altaro to install and review their Hyper-V Backup. I’ve installed their latest version of Hyper-V Back-up (HVB)

I’m running Altaro Hyper-V on my Hyper-V cluster.

After installing HVB I opened the management console (dashboard) which looks like this :

I think it’s a very nice and clean console with enough information. One major drawback I ran into is that I can’t scroll through the left pane. I ‘m running a screen resolution of 1276 x 747 (Remote Desktop) and I can’t seem to reach the functions at the bottom. I’m sure this will be updated in their future release.

Configuring Hyper-V Backup

That’s very easy. Choose Select Hyper-V Guest VMs and just select the servers you wish to back-up. Selecting the servers now, doesn’t automatically mean that HVB will back-up them now, Therefor you have to select a Backup drive and Schedule.

Select the servers you want to include in your back-up strategy. I noticed they creating and removing virtual servers you see an unknown server. This means that HVB noticed some unused files. Good idea to check this, and clean-up the unneeded files.

Now you can choose the back-up destination :

A (very) nice feature is that you can choose for multiple destinations and Backup drive mirroring. This means that your back-up files are on 2 separate locations, in case the primary back-up location fails. Very very nice.

Now we can drag the virtual machines in the pre-configured Backup schedules, or create a custom one:

You can use the Backup Schedule Calculator to verify how often your schedule takes place.

You have the following Notification Settings settings (Email also included)

Back-up options

What back-up options do we have? Of course, every IT geek want’s to tweak their settings. Well first I want to let you know that using HVB for some months now, I never had the need to change things. Everything was working smoothly and more important…. it kept running smoothly and fast. But yeah, there are options :

and

and

and

(use this for non VSS aware VM’s, like linux and stuff)

Advanced Restore Options

Using HVB it’s no problem to test your back-up’s (Fire Drill) or to restore only one file using the File Level Restore option.

Updating Hyper-V Backup

Updating the software is very easy. Just click About HVB and press Check for updates.

In my case their was a new version available :

Just press update now and press a couple of times on next and you’re running their latest version.
Very easy. (A fully automated update would also be nice although )

 

Conclusion

Pros:

• Very ease and stable to use
• Fast
• Cheap
• Excellent support
• Nice logging, for example it’s easy to see which files have been changed since last back-up etc
  

 

Cons:

• GUI interface could be better
• Sometimes you need specific options like the possibility the back-up a specific drive instead of all drives
• no support for encryption

Altaro also have a Free Hyper-V Backup solution. (click for link)