With Microsoft Hyper-V a standout feature of Windows Server 2008, a growing number of businesses are considering adopting this promising virtualization technology to make better use of their existing hardware while also lowering costs and increasing business agility. As virtualization technologies have continued to mature, more and more organizations of all sizes have deployed virtual environments to support even their most mission-critical applications.

Because these applications cannot tolerate any amount of downtime, organizations must also put in place a backup and recovery strategy for their Hyper-V or other virtualized environment. And, just as data and system protection strategies for a physical environment must help the organization meet recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), an effective backup and recovery strategy for a virtualized environment must ensure both operational recovery and disaster recovery — but without adding management cost and complexity.

Hyper-V Backup and Recovery Challenges

Protecting virtual server systems and data can be challenging. For example, one of the primary objectives of doing a backup — whether of physical or virtual systems — is to restore data as quickly as possible to avoid negatively impacting the systems and applications associated with that data. However, more data almost always means longer backup times. And, because the amount of data and files kept on a virtual server is typically much greater than what is kept on a physical server, virtualization is likely to affect backup windows.

Also, with a Hyper-V environment, whole virtual machine recovery requires an image-level backup while individual file recovery requires file-based backup. Consequently, a backup administration must either perform two backups (entire guest machine + file-by-file backup) or they have to restore an entire guest machine in order to recover a single file.

Virtualization often adds complexity and cost to backup and restore operations, especially if organizations use one backup tool for their physical environment and another for their virtualized infrastructure. With Hyper-V, complexity and cost also increase because multiple agents are required to back up multiple guest machines, and Microsoft application protection can be an added challenge because the virtualization tool must support Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) aware backups for virtual applications such as Microsoft Exchange.

Finally, in a virtualized environment, few options are available if the organization needs to recover a physical machine to a virtual machine and vice versa. Yet, this capability is vital to an effective disaster recovery strategy.

Protecting Hyper-V Environments

While there are several challenges associated with backing up and recovering a Hyper-V environment, cutting edge tools are now available to address these issues. For example, an advanced backup tool that supports Microsoft’s VSS and integrates with Hyper-V can now deliver integrated data protection, to easily backup and restore a virtual host environment, application guest machine or an individual file residing inside a guest.

Next-generation backup and recovery tools can prevent the time-consuming complexities of backup and recovery as well, enabling administrators to do a complete virtual machine image-level restore as well as granular recovery restore of individual files and folders from a single-pass backup. This not only reduces recovery time but also minimizes the footprint of backup storage resources.

Furthermore, the most advanced tools will also support both physical and virtual environments. With the same user interface and management console for backing up and recovering physical servers as well as virtual machines, these tools optimize data protection while keeping costs under control. Because these tools are very tightly integrated with Microsoft’s virtual framework, they provide organizations a global view of their entire backup environment, including all physical and virtual machines. From that integrated view, organizations simply select which systems are to be backed up or which are to be recovered. And, to further ease administration and keep costs low, these same tools can also be used to automate post-recovery operations of restored virtual machines.

In addition, a growing number of powerful backup and recovery tools now have a more cost-effective licensing model, with some offering unlimited guest virtual machine protection per Hyper-V server host with a single agent license. Better yet, these sophisticated tools will also protect VSS-aware, business-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint residing on a virtual machine through high-performance, application-aware agents that ensure log truncation, consistency checks, and more comprehensive overall backup and recovery.

Furthermore, the most advanced data and system protection tool will also make the recovery point conversion from physical to virtual (P2V) as well as virtual back to physical (V2P) easy and quick. This rapid and reliable P2V conversion is especially useful when recovery hardware is not available. The tool features a conversion wizard that facilitates the capture and encapsulation of a physical system into a recovery point that can be seamlessly and automatically converted to a Microsoft .VHD file format for instant disaster recovery on a Hyper-V platform. P2V conversion can also be scheduled through the tool’s easy-to-use wizard. Moreover, the same tool also makes it easy to go from a virtual environment back to a physical one even when the destination hardware and drivers are not similar to the original.

An Optimized Virtual Infrastructure

As organizations continue to adopt Hyper-V and other virtualization technologies, advanced backup and recovery tools will help ensure that businesses can maximize the benefits of their virtualized environment. The most advanced tools will address the challenges of backing up and recovering a Hyper-V infrastructure to help organizations meet their recovery point and recovery time objectives.

With an effective backup and recovery strategy and tools in place, organizations can leverage virtualization to increase flexibility and eliminate many of the economic and operational limitations associated with physical infrastructures while also improving hardware utilization and physical server consolidation, increasing availability and operational agility, and lowering costs.

Pat Hanavan is vice president of Product Management at Symantec.