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Title
Hyper-V Agentless: How to backup using checkpoints only -
Description
In some situations you may not want to use VSS with agentless protected machines on a Hyper-V host. In such cases, you can disable VSS and use checkpoints created by Hyper-V instead of VSS for backups. Please see below for steps to enable checkpoint only backups.NOTE: Choosing to not use VSS will result in crash consistent snapshots only. If you are running any application on the server that has VSS writes, such as Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, etc., it is highly recommended to use VSS.
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Resolution
- Open the Core Console and select the Hyper-V agentless machine you want to change..
- Click on Settings and on menu to the left click Hyper-V.
- Click and change Snapshot configuration to Do not create VSS snapshot during transfer, and click the checkmark to apply.
Option Description Attempt VSS snapshot first Attempts to create a VSS snapshot during the transfer. If the snapshot fails, a checkpoint is created. Do not create VSS snapshot Creates a checkpoint for every transfer. Use only VSS snapshot Transfers only VSS snapshots. If the VSS snapshot creation fails, then the transfer fails. If you want to validate that the changes were properly applied and are working as expected you can do the following:
- From the Hyper-V VM's Operative System, run the command vssadmin list shadows from an elevated Command Line window and you must not see any shadow create after the time that you enabled to option to only use checkpoints.
- You can also validate the Windows Events\Application logs looking for VSS type events.
- From the Hyper-V host you can review the Hyper-V VMMs-Admin events.
- You can also validate directly from the Hyper-V Manager while a snapshot is being created, as per the below illustration.
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Additional Information
For more details about the advantages and disadvantages of using Checkpoints instead of VSS Snapshots please refer to the following documentation from Microsoft: