Backup Hyper-V Cluster with Altaro Hyper-V back-up

[aproost]

We want to use Altaro Hyper-V back-up for backing up the Hyper-V cluster. I've installed a trial to test the software.

But when I do a test back-up the complete cluster goes down. This is during the VSS Windows Shadow Copy creation.

Does anybody hav experience with this?

[IainS]

We use it for a Hyper V 2 Node Cluster with VMs on two different iSCSI SANs. One is P4300 x 2 Nodes and the other is an EqualLogic unit. To my knowledge we've never had a problem like this trigger the cluster to fail.

Originally the Hyper V cluster was Server 2008 R2 based, then Server 2012 and is now migrating to Server 2012 R2. Altarro has worked on all of them - but has had the occasional problem on individual VM backups, I think due to VSS issues.

Altarro seems to be an inexpensive solution that works quite well. In some ways I wish we went with Dell's AppAssure due to it's remarkable recovery capabilities (that we do use for some client PCs) but we had already gone with Altarro for the cluster and it cost far less (on the server side). Aside from testing I don't think we have used Altarro for recovery since you need to recover the entire VM which can take quite a while. We have other backup methods that are faster for a small set of files.