Support of Hyper-V clusters
A Microsoft Hyper-V failover cluster is a set of several Hyper-V hosts (nodes) combined into one unit. If one node goes down, another one can take the load (virtual machines and services with enabled High Availability).
You can back up virtual machines in a Hyper-V cluster with Acronis Agent for Hyper-V:
- VM migration events across the cluster are automatically handled by Acronis Cyber Protect, so that VM remains protected after migrations once you apply a backup plan to it
- The VM storage used in the Hyper-V cluster can be both SMBv3 and/or Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV)
Follow these recommendations to set up a correct backup of clustered Hyper-V machines:
- Install Agent for Hyper-V on each node of the cluster.
- A machine must be available for backup no matter what node it migrates to. To ensure that a backup plan can access a machine on any node, the Acronis Managed Machine service (MMS) must run under a domain user account that has administrative privileges on corresponding cluster nodes and also has permissions to access Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV). We recommend that you specify such an account for the agent service during the Agent for Hyper-V installation.
- Register all of the agents on the management server, either during installation or later.
Keep in mind these details to ensure High Availability of a recovered machine:
- When you recover backed-up disks to an existing Hyper-V virtual machine, the machine's High Availability property in Microsoft Windows Failover Cluster remains as is.
- When you recover backed-up disks to a new Hyper-V virtual machine or when you do a conversion to a Hyper-V virtual machine within a backup plan, the resulting machine is not highly available. It is considered as a spare machine and is normally powered off. If you need to use the machine in the production environment, you can configure it for High Availability from the Failover Cluster Management snap-in.
Support of Hyper-V Guest Clusters
A Guest cluster is a set of several virtual machines running Windows, which are hosted on one or more Hyper-V hosts (which could be part of a Failover cluster itself) and are combined into a single unit by enabling Microsoft Failover Cluster role inside the guest operating system of these VMs.
Agent for Hyper-V does not support backup of Hyper-V virtual machines that are nodes of a Windows Server Failover Cluster. A VSS snapshot at the host level can even temporarily disconnect the external quorum disk from the cluster. If you want to back up these machines, install Acronis Agents (for Windows) in the guest operating systems.