Backing up clustered Hyper-V machines

In a Hyper-V cluster, virtual machines may migrate between cluster nodes. Follow these recommendations to set up a correct backup of clustered Hyper-V machines:

1. 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, run the plan under a domain user account that has administrative privileges on each of the cluster nodes.

   We recommend that you specify such an account for the agent service during the Agent for Hyper-V installation. Otherwise, you will need to specify credentials for such account in every centralized backup plan or recovery task.

2. Install Agent for Hyper-V on each node of the cluster.
3. Register all of the agents on the management server, either during installation or later.
4. Back up clustered machines by using the management server, rather than by connecting directly to a cluster node.

High Availability of a recovered machine

When recovering backed-up disks to a new Hyper-V virtual machine, you can choose whether to make the machine highly available. In the VM/VS Selection window, after clicking Create a new virtual machine on the server, you need to specify the target Hyper-V host. If you select the target host under the cluster, the resulting virtual machine will be highly available. If you select the same host outside the cluster, the machine will not be highly available.

When you recover backed-up disks to an existing Hyper-V virtual machine, the machine's High Availability property remains as is.

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.