Alright.  I was running a single Hyper-V server and doing backups with diskshadow, life was good. Now, I have setup a couple of Hyper-V servers and a Cluster Shared Volume on a Storage server with ISCSI.What about backups? I would have loved to stay with diskshadow but apparently Microsoft felt it wasn’t important to include CSV support in this application.

So I tried Microsoft DPM2010 but found it to be incompatible with USB and ESATA storage devices. I had worked around that using Virtual Disk Images but still felt like the data would be had to get to in the event of a failure. Next, I tried Hyperoo a Hyper-V backup program built specifically, but not limited to, Hyper-V backups. It just so happen to also support CSV and appeared to be using RSYNC to perform its backups. I really liked the application and the support seems to be quite responsive; however currently I’m getting extremely slow transfer rates. I’m currently working threw this with their support team, more on that in another post.

Now what? I still need some flat files that don’t take days to transfer. After pouring over the internet I came up with this. First I have my backup device attached to the primary hyper-v node. Then I found out what the guid was for my CSV. I ran vssadmin list volumes and found the volume with no drive letter attached and copied out to blank note pad. Now lets create a Volume Shadow and mount it and automate it using a powershell script.

Tuesday.ps1:

#set $vsspath
$vssLogpath = “\\?\Volume{48580893-b395-11df-b001-001517e7c001}\”

#use vssadmin to create shadow and grab the name of the snapshot
$vssLogname = ($(Vssadmin create shadow /for=$vssLogpath)[5].split(” “))[-1]

#if you need file access to the snapshot
.\dosdev X: $vsslogname

#### take storage snapshot
Xcopy “X:\Virtual Hard Disks\*.*” “F:\Tuesday\virtual hard disks\*.*” /e /s /y /F /O /X /R /H
#echo Testing 123 ….

#remove
.\dosdev /d X:

#delete created shadow
Vssadmin delete shadows /ALL /quiet

Now to schedule it as a task I created a batch file:

Tuesday.CMD

powershell -command “& ‘./Tuesday.ps1′ “

Now if you don’t have dosdev to mount your shadow you can google it and download it. I create scripts and scheduled tasks for the days I wanted backups. Make sure everything is in the same directory and set your start path to that directory in your scheduled task and you should be good to go. I didn’t come up with most of this its compiled from couple of different forums but I hope this helps someone.

-B