To those that wants to perform Live backup or export (to a local drive or external drive) of your virtual machines via Hyper-V, before you jump into that there are few things that you need to take concern of;
- Where is your virtual machines located on what server operating system?
- Does the server support live backup or export?
What is live backup or export?
- A live backup or export is where you could run your backup without having to shut down the virtual machines. This require minimal to zero impact or downtime.
If your virtual machines are hosted on a legacy server, such as Windows Server 2012 below, you are require to shut down the virtual machines and perform the backup or export. If the virtual machine is not shut down the export button will not be shown to you to perform the backup. However, please do take note that if you were to migrate virtual machines from legacy server to non-legacy server, is best to not use the export feature in the legacy server, please refer the reference below for full explanation and proper way to migrate.
If your virtual machines are hosted on a non-legacy server, such as Windows server 2012 and above, then you can perform live backup or export without the need to experiences total downtime. As technology getting more advance this is the benefit to IT admins to perform their tasks without the need to perform after hours, and end users will not experience total downtime.
Do also read up and understand when to use checkpoints and when not to use checkpoints. Is basically means snapshots.
References:
- https://sabrinaksy.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/how-to-migrate-or-import-vm-from-windows-server-2008-r2-to-windows-server-2012-r2/
- https://www.petri.com/live-exporting-windows-server-2012-r2-hyper-v-vms
- https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2016/06/16/live-export-a-running-virtual-machine-or-a-checkpoint/
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