Skip to main content
SolarWinds MSP
  • Login
  • Support
  • Partnerships
    • Partnerships Overview
    • Solution Provider Program
    • Technology Alliance Program
    • Distributor Program
SolarWinds MSP
  • Products
    • SolarWinds N-central Automate what you need. Tackle complex networks. Try this remote monitoring and management solution built to help maximize efficiency and scale.
    • SolarWinds RMM Start fast. Grow at your own pace. Try this powerful but simple remote monitoring and management solution.
    • SolarWinds EDR Defend against ransomware, zero-day attacks, and evolving online threats with Endpoint Detection and Response
    • SolarWinds Backup Manage data protection for servers, workstations applications, documents and Microsoft 365 from one SaaS dashboard.
    • Mail Protection & Archiving Protect users from email threats and downtime.
    • Password Management Easily adopt and demonstrate best practice password and documentation management workflows.
      • Passportal Demo
    • PSA & Ticketing Manage ticketing, reporting, and billing to increase helpdesk efficiency.
    • Remote Support Help support customers and their devices with remote support tools designed to be fast and powerful.
  • Solutions

    I'm looking for...

    • Security Solutions
    • Monitoring Solutions
    • Efficiency Solutions
  • Resources
    • Blog
    • Webcasts & Events
    • Ask the N-central Experts
    • Daily Live Demos
    • RMM Foundations Training
    • Upcoming Events
    • Upcoming Webcasts
    • Resource Center
    • COVID-19 Resources
    • Resource Library
      • Case Studies
      • Product Information
      • eBooks
      • White Papers
      • Infographics
    • SolarWinds MSP Free Tools
    • GDPR Resource Center
    • Security Resource Center
    • MSP Institute Webinar Series
    • MSP Advice Project
  • About
    • Contact
    • Customer Success
    • Worldwide sales and support
    • Careers
    • Awards and Recognition
    • Get A Quote
    • Newsroom
      • Press Releases
      • In The News
      • Media Contacts
      • COVID-19 Response
    • Leadership Team
    • Legal
      • Cookie Policy
      • Privacy Notice
      • Software Services Agreement
      • Terms of Use
      • Backup Fair Use Policy
    • Security
      • SolarWinds Security Statement
      • Vendor Data Protection Requirements
    • Support
  • IT Departments
  • Contact Sales
    • Get A Quote
    • General Inquiry
  • TRY NOW
    • SolarWinds RMM
    • SolarWinds Backup
    • MSP Manager
    • SolarWinds Passportal
    • SolarWinds N-central
    • SolarWinds Mail Assure
    • SolarWinds Risk Intelligence
    • SolarWinds Take Control
  • Request a Quote
  • Try Now
    • SolarWinds RMM
    • SolarWinds N-central
    • SolarWinds Backup
    • MSP Manager
    • SolarWinds Mail Assure
    • SolarWinds Passportal
    • SolarWinds Risk Intelligence
    • SolarWinds Take Control
Request quote
Filter Blogs
  • Filter by:
  • MSP Business
    • Automation
    • Backup & Disaster Recovery
    • Security-series
    • Best Practices
    • Business
    • Business Growth
    • Business Risk
    • Cloud Computing
    • Customer Service
    • Cybersecurity
    • Cybersecurity Awareness Month
    • Data
    • GDPR
    • Internet of Things
    • IT Support
    • ITSM
    • LOGICcards
    • Machine Learning
    • Mail
    • Managed Services
    • Marketing
    • Mobile
    • Networking
    • Operations
    • Podcast
    • Product
    • PSA
    • Remote Management
    • Research & Trends
    • Risk Intelligence
    • Security
    • Security Vlog
    • Service Desk
    • Services & Support
    • The Head Nerds
    • Tips & Advice
    • Training
Home Blog MSP Business Backup & Disaster Recovery Key Tips for Efficient Hyper-V Backup
Backup & Disaster Recovery

Key Tips for Efficient Hyper-V Backup

By SolarWinds MSP
6 April, 2020

As organizations look to their managed services providers (MSPs) for help streamlining workflows and improving operational efficiency, virtual machines should be a key part of any business-grade IT environment today. While virtual machines—or VMs—have long played a role in digitally driven organizations, they’ve become essential for teams that want to increase the capabilities of their IT assets, improve organizational agility, and add an extra layer of security to their digital infrastructure. 

The number of organizations using VMs is already substantial, and it continues to rise each day. A 2016 report found that 48% of respondents were running 1,000 or more VMs in virtualized environments and 31% of respondents running 1,000 VMs or more in the private cloud. A follow-up report done in 2018 saw all surveyed cloud providers see increased adoption—often dramatically. As an increasing number of businesses begin to understand the value-add of operating VMs, these figures will continue to climb—and that means MSPs must be able to provide the kind of support their customers need to get the most out of this IT trend. 

Managing virtual machine backups is one of the most critical aspects of VM support. With popular VM services such as Microsoft Hyper V and VMware vSphere, it’s up to you to efficiently store and protect critical organizational data without disrupting existing workflows. By doing so, you’ll make sure your customers are prepared in the event of a serious data recovery situation, such as a cyberattack, system failure, or natural disaster.

However, while backups are a must for anyone employing VMs, that doesn’t mean everyone has their best practices down. These can differ between Microsoft Hyper V and VMware vSphere, so it’s important to understand the ins and outs of each if you’re going to provide customers with the peace of mind they need when running critical operations in a variety of virtualized environments. 

What is Hyper-V?

CTA Image

SolarWinds Backup

Exceed your RTOs and RPOs—start using SolarWinds Backup today.

Try It Free Learn More

Microsoft Hyper-V is a popular virtualization software tool that comes in three versions: Hyper-V for Windows Servers, Hyper-V Servers, and Hyper-V on Windows 10. While many virtualization applications are limited to virtualizing operating systems, Hyper-V is unique in that it can also be used to set up and operate virtualized versions of hardware assets such as hard drives and network switches. 

Another benefit of Hyper-V compared to competing products is that it’s not restricted to virtual machines on a user’s workstation. Instead, it can be used to create and manage VMs across an entire IT environment, such as servers. This makes Hyper-V a popular option for organizations that want to maintain dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of VMs at the same time, while being able to set all of them up using the same virtualization application. 

Other organizations may use Hyper-V to create virtual machines for a diverse range of reasons. For example, VMs are a popular option for running different operating systems on the same physical device, in a virtualized environment. This can be an important tool for developers building enterprise tools, and can allow employees to work in operating systems that they may be more comfortable in. 

Additionally, teams may want to use Hyper-V to set up virtualized versions of other IT assets. For instance, running virtualized environments on servers is an increasingly popular way to boost operational efficiency. This practice ensures servers are being fully used and that different workloads are separated from one another. Server virtualization can also have cybersecurity and data continuity benefits—safely isolating VMs in their own environments in case other workloads are breached or corrupted in some way. 

What is a good Hyper-V backup strategy?

To effectively reap all of the benefits of Microsoft Hyper-V, it’s critical that MSPs and their customers back up their virtual machines on a regular basis. Otherwise, they risk losing critical workloads and carefully adjusted configurations in the event of a system failure, cybercriminal attack, or natural disaster. In these situations, knowing that you’ve invested in a good Hyper-V backup strategy is a must. 


When preparing your Hyper-V backup plan, there are several important things to keep in mind to make sure you execute responsibly and strategically. First, it’s helpful to remember that Hyper-V’s checkpoints are not comprehensive backups in and of themselves. While these checkpoints do capture images of VMs (and data) at a certain point in time, they capture older information. This means that if you need to restore a VM for whatever reason, you’re going to revert to old data that may be significantly less valuable to you.

Second, MSPs should take the necessary steps to protect Hyper-V backups once they’re completed and run performance checks to ensure they’ve been backed up properly. For the former, encryption is a popular way to secure production data. After all, VM backups are essential to your customers’ data continuity plans, so taking every possible step to protect them from internal or external bad actors is essential. 

For the latter, it’s important to make sure your Hyper-V backup strategy worked to plan. By checking to ensure your backups have been stored successfully and have been capturing data in a way that will be usable to you in the future, you’ll be doing due diligence that will pay off down the line. This can be particularly necessary depending on what operating systems and VM applications you’re using and what the backup process would look like for you and your customers. 

What are the best tools to help with VM backup?

Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere are both popular and effective virtualization applications that can offer important capabilities for your customers. However, despite the rich features they offer for setting up and operating virtual machines across organizations, many users find them challenging to use—especially when it comes to complicated processes like backing up VMs beyond the checkpoint or snapshot functionalities that they each offer. 

Accordingly, you should be on the lookout for third-party tools that can supplement your virtualization applications to take the guesswork out of VM backups. With SolarWinds® Backup, MSPs can get the full suite of cloud-enabled tools they need to streamline backups for their customers’ virtual machines. SolarWinds Backup can help with Hyper-V backup, VMware backup, and more—storing critical business continuity information in a secure global cloud with industry-leading recovery options. Whether you’re looking for full-image restores or you need to recover essential applications, SolarWinds Backup offers the kinds of rapid recovery you’ll need in any data loss scenario. 

 

Additional reading

How to Back up Hyper-V Virtual Machines
Common Hyper-V Problems and How to Fix Them
How to Back up VMware Virtual Machines
You might also like...
Automation

What the Head Nerds Were Up to in 2020

Backup & Disaster Recovery

Why Do MSPs Choose SolarWinds Backup? IT Central Station Finds Out

Backup & Disaster Recovery

Three Reasons Why MSPs Should Offer OneDrive Backup 

Backup & Disaster Recovery

vSphere Backup Best Practices

Backup & Disaster Recovery

Four Reasons Why Your Business Needs Off-site Backup

Backup & Disaster Recovery

Why Appliance-Free Backup Is a Big Advantage for Service Providers

Want to stay up to date?

Get the latest MSP tips, tricks, and ideas sent to your inbox each week.

Loading form....

If the form does not load in a few seconds, it is probably because your browser is using Tracking Protection. This is either an Ad Blocker plug-in or your browser is in private mode. Please allow tracking on this page to request a subscription.

Note: Firefox users may see a shield icon to the left of the URL in the address bar. Click on this to disable tracking protection for this session/site

Recent Posts
  • What the Head Nerds Were Up to in 2020
  • RMM and PSA Tools: How to Make the Most of Both
  • How to Empower an IT Help Desk Team for Success
  • Six Tips That Will Make Managing Your MSP Company Easier
  • January 2021 Patch Tuesday: One Actively Exploited Vulnerability and a Few Likely to Be
Categories:
  • Security (230)
  • Tips & Advice (122)
  • Best Practices (94)
  • Managed Services (86)
  • Backup & Disaster Recovery (83)
  • The Head Nerds (75)
  • Business Growth (75)
  • IT Support (42)
  • Business (39)
  • Automation (37)
  • Cybersecurity (37)
  • Operations (34)
  • Mail (33)
  • Remote Management (28)
  • ITSM (25)
  • Cloud Computing (21)
  • Networking (21)
  • Data (21)
  • Marketing (14)
  • Product (11)
  • PSA (11)
  • Service Desk (5)
  • Services & Support (5)
  • Mobile (4)
  • Risk Intelligence (4)
  • Customer Service (3)
  • Internet of Things (3)
  • Research & Trends (2)
  • Training (2)
  • GDPR (2)
  • Business Risk (1)
  • LOGICcards (1)
Show moreless
SolarWinds MSP

Products
  • SolarWinds RMM
  • SolarWinds N-central
  • SolarWinds Backup
  • SolarWinds EDR
  • SolarWinds MSP Manager
  • SolarWinds Mail Assure
  • SolarWinds Risk Intelligence
  • SolarWinds Take Control
  • SolarWinds Passportal
  • All Products Use Cases
Solutions
  • Security Solutions
  • Monitoring Solutions
  • Efficiency Solutions
  • Identify which RMM solution is right for me
  • Drive Efficiency with Automation
  • Manage my MSP Business More Efficiently
  • Manage my IT Department More Efficiently
  • Layered Security
  • Cross-Platform Support
  • Data-Driven Insights
About
  • About Us
  • Careers
  • Newsroom
  • Leadership Team
  • Upcoming Events
  • Subscription Preferences
  • SolarWinds
  • SolarWinds Trust Center
  • COVID-19 Response
Support
  • SolarWinds RMM
  • Solarwinds N-central
  • SolarWinds Backup
  • SolarWinds Mail Assure
  • SolarWinds Take Control
  • SolarWinds MSP Manager
  • Solarwinds Risk Intelligence
  • Solarwinds Threat Monitor
  • SolarWinds Passportal
  • SolarWinds Take Control Downloads
  • Backup & Recovery Downloads
  • Service Status

Footer 2

  • Legal Documents
  • Privacy
  • California Privacy Rights
  • Security Information
  • Sitemap

© SolarWinds MSP Canada ULC and SolarWinds MSP UK Ltd.
All Rights Reserved.