Advice on off-site backup of Hyper-V Failover Cluster
- by Paul McCowat
We are currently setting up a Server 2008 R2 which will be off-site over a leased line with VPN. At the main site is 2 x Hyper-V hosts in a failover cluster with PowerVault M3000i iSCSI SAN.
We are using BackupAssist for local backups and each host backups up itself and it's guests nightly creating a 500GB backup each which is copied to a 2TB rotated NAS drive. Files and SQL DB's are also backed up / log shipped etc.
Looking for the best way to backup the Hyper-V VM's and copy them off-site so that the OS's are only a month old and the data is a day old. The main backups are too large to transfer between backups so options discussed so far are:
Take rotating individual backups of the VM's each day and copy over, Day 1 SQL VM, Day 2 Exchange VM etc, would require more storage.
Look in to Hyper-V snapshots, however don't believe these are supported in clustering.
3rd party replication tools