Like I’m sure many of you, I have a lab full of virtual machines. I can’t imagine what would happen to my productivity if I had a system crash and all of those virtual systems vanished at the same time. The answer? backup those virtual systems. How is the question. It would be quite a manual process to power down and backup each system one by one. With the introduction of Hyper-V as a core OS component I couldn’t help but believe there would be some way in the core OS to handle the backup job required. Fortunately, my believe seems to be correct.
Using the built in Windows backup it is fully possible to backup your Hyper-V systems – even if they are in the running state. Windows backup will realize they are in the running state and take appropriate action before backing them up. I’m still testing with this and I haven’t actually tried a restore (so I shouldn’t probably be writing this until I do!) but what I have so far looks like it’s doing the job. Here’s how to set it up.
Full Article – http://blogs.msdn.com/steverac/archive/2009/03/08/backing-up-hyper-v-virtual-machines.aspx
