Hi community
I have been using Win 8 Hyper V, to build a number of SharePoint 2010 and 2013 test farms. Essentially, set up a windows 2012 parent disk with some common stuff such as all the browsers, fiddler and ULS logger. Thereafter, I can reference my parent disk when I create my individual child diff disks( New-VHD). Now I am able to install SharePoint 2010 or 2013 without the hassle of having install the operating system each time.
Now I want backup these diff disks ahead of testing a CU or other farm changes, so I wondered what is the best approach here:
- Use Hyper-v snapshot facility: how many of these, how often, and how reliable are these? Also, if I need to backup my snapshot files is there best practices here as to which ones I need to backup
- Go for physical backup of the my hyper-v: VHX and config files and if so what are the key files to backup. I had look at my spdev installation (see attachment) and there appears to be a load of related files – how are these created and do I need to back these all up.?
Daniel
Hello,
Keep in mind that you need to take your farm offline prior to any snapshot. The easiest way is to shutdown every vm of your test farm
Trevor
Interesting links thanks.
“Write operations occur on the new drive and read operations occur on both drives, which has the same net affect as a differencing disk. Every snapshot that you add reduces disk performance further.”
I think diff disk are ok for test but obviously not for production. Snapshots are a definite NO when using diff disks.
Out interest, I take it you are all SPAutoinstalling your test farms and including creating the VHDX, O/S and SP2010, SP2013. et al.
Daniel
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff621103.aspx#ConfigServ
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff621103.aspx#RevBP
Trevor,
Thanks for the reply
Are you saying it is not recommended to snapshot diff disks? Also, out of interest have you had any issues with snapshots failing, and what did you have to do to recover your vm?
I take your point with multi sever farm and snapshots since this would have to simultaneous across all vms..
Well, keep in mind none of these are recommended/supported for SharePoint (differencing disks, snapshot, online backup). But snapshots are more of a ‘state’ rather than a backup/restore point, if backup means shipping it off to tape, etc. If you’re just testing, though, and want to quickly roll a VM backup, snapshots are ok in a non-production environment. I do this with my dev single-server VMs. I wouldn’t recommend it in a multi-server farm.
