Add a Hyper-V environment
To add a Microsoft Hyper-V environment in Portal, you must:
- Install a Hyper-V Agent Management service.
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Specify Hyper-V environment information and credentials so that the Agent can authenticate with the environment that you want to protect.
IMPORTANT: Beginning with Hyper-V Agent 8.84, you must provide Hyper-V environment information and credentials for the Management service before you can install Hyper-V Agent Host services.
- Install one or more Hyper-V Agent Host services.
You can then back up and restore virtual machines (VMs) without installing Agent software on individual VMs.
Note: Beginning in Hyper-V Agent version 9.12, the Agent can also back up and restore VMs in Microsoft Azure Stack HCI clusters.
The Hyper-V Agent concurrently backs up multiple VMs in a single backup job. In a cluster, backup operations can be distributed across nodes, making the solution scalable in large environments. Within a Hyper-V cluster, the Agent can back up VMs that have migrated to different nodes or to different storage.
You can include multiple VMs in a single backup job, but each VM is backed up as a separate task on the vault. As a result, each VM has a single backup history, even if it is moved from one backup job to another over time. When restoring a VM, you do not need to remember which backup job it was in.
Beginning in version 9.1, to improve the performance of incremental backups, the Hyper-V Agent determines which parts of a VM disk have changed since the last backup and only reads disk blocks that have changed. To determine which disk blocks have changed, the Hyper-V Agent uses Resilient Change Tracking (RCT): a Hyper-V feature that tracks changes on VM disks. In previous versions, the Agent had to read all disk blocks in an incremental backup.
You can create application-consistent backups of Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory on Windows VMs. Application-consistent backups minimize the amount of work needed to fully restore applications.
You can restore entire VMs using the Hyper-V Agent or restore specific files, folders and database items from Windows VMs. Beginning with Hyper-V Agent 9.00, you can restore a VM within minutes using the Rapid VM Restore method. See Restore Hyper-V data.