Hyper-V Host Disaster Recovery – Bare Metal Restore

Hi all,

Recently our tech support team ran some tests on restoring an image of a Hyper-V host machine, with 3 guest VMs, to new hardware.

This involves backing up the host machine by way of imaging, as described in a previous blog post of mine.

The experiment was designed to test the hardware independent nature of both the bare metal restore, and also of Hyper-V. We used a laptop as the original host, and a desktop as the destination server to maximize the differences between the hardware.

We successfully (and easily) recovered the host and all Guest VMs. Only the host needed to be reactivated – as expected, because the underlying hardware changed.

Please see our full report:

Testing Report: Simulated disaster recovery of a Hyper-V host and all Guest VMs to new hardware

In other news, I’m writing a new slide-show presentation, titled “Don’t Hyperventilate over Hyper-V backup!”, which will be presented at the SMB Nation Exhibition in October 2009. Please stay tuned for more news!

Linus