We have earlier outlined the importance of Hyper-V data protection, and now we can further discuss the best practices you can easily implement to ensure the protection and, most importantly, the recoverability of your Hyper-V data.
First and foremost, you must understand how to build the right Hyper-V data protection strategy.
The Hyper-V hypervisor is so easy and flexible that it has attracted millions of businesses, and now they run their infrastructure on Hyper-V. If you’re one of them, you must choose the right backup strategy and the proper data protection solution that meets your infrastructure’s requirements to ensure the protection of your Hyper-V data. Let’s overview some of the most-used data protection strategies to protect your Hyper-V data efficiently.
It would help if you bared in mind the following before you devise your Hyper-V data protection strategy:
Hyper-V Checkpoints Are Not Backups
Many people have made and are still making the mistake of thinking that Hyper-V checkpoints (or as previously known, Hyper-V snapshots) are reliable forms of backups. While checkpoints are essential if you want to revert to a previous state of your VM, they are not inherently backups. These checkpoints rely on the virtual infrastructure and base VHD or VHDX disks and any checkpoint files. When the fundamental virtual structure is corrupted, these checkpoints become unusable, unlike backups that are naturally autonomous from the virtual infrastructure they back up. Checkpoints are rather best for quick rollbacks in specific cases (like in the event of a system failure).
Account for RTO and RPO in your Hyper-V backup Strategy.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is an essential tool for developing backup strategies to set the time required for recovering from a DR event. To protect your data, the RTO is set as the amount of time you can afford to have your systems down and still be able to have your business operations back at a very reasonable level.
Recovery Point Objective or RPO is the amount of data you can afford to lose during downtime without causing any damage to your business. Calculating your RPO is, in fact, a key factor in setting up your backup schedule to determine how much data can be lost between your latest VM backup and an actual disaster and whether your business can afford to lose this amount of data.
You must always remember to determine your RTO and RPO values and design your protection strategy as presented fit for your business. A fitting Hyper-V protection strategy will stem from taking into consideration the values of both RPO and RTO.
Encrypt Your Hyper-V Backups
While many people back up their data and leave it like that, it is somewhat necessary to secure your backup data as well. Implementing this strategy will ensure your backed-up data is not left out of the overall data security strategy. You can easily protect your backup data by encrypting with Advanced Encryption Standard AES while moving across the network, disk, or backup repository. Any successful Hyper-V data protection strategy should very much include encrypted backups.
Verify Your Hyper-V Backups
Another significant step towards complete protection of your Hyper-V data is to verify your backups’ functionality regularly and ensure they can be used for recovery. Many people have ended up in ugly situations where they needed their backup data, only to find out it was corrupted unexpectedly. Therefore, it is crucial to include a means of verifying backups in your Hyper-V data protection strategy. Frequent verification can protect your data from any unforeseen circumstance, and not only during a disaster recovery scenario which, in most cases, throw people off balance. One straightforward way to verify your backup is to choose a data protection solution that includes an automated backup verification feature to alleviate the intensity and difficulty of manually verifying backups.
A perfect Hyper-V data protection strategy requires a first-rate data protection solution. Explore more about our data protection solution and worry no more about losing your Hyper-V data.
