More than one year ago Microsoft released Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007, its solution for enterprise backup/restore.
In the company strategy System Center can serve as a modular management suite for virtual infrastructures, and DPM is a key component, but the 2007 version only supported Virtual Server 2005.
This week Microsoft releases the first service pack which introduces support for Hyper-V (both the version embedded in Windows Server 2008 and the stand-alone Hyper-V Server 2008).
It means that Microsoft virtualization professionals will be finally able to backup a running virtual machine without service interruption.
Here’s a video showing the product in action:
Interestingly enough, on the video page on TechNet EDGE Microsoft suggests to run DPM 2007 SP1 on the Hyper-V host itself, to realize a self-contained solution.
This approach sounds very risky (what happens if DPM needs a major upgrade that requires the OS reboot?) and probably has a negative impact on the host performance.
This is exactly the kind of issues that may compromise the stability of any hypervisor. It becomes a concrete risk as long as the Windows Server 2008 copy that runs on the Hyper-V parent partition allows the installation of any file.
Microsoft is not the only one that needs to discourage such practice: VMware dropped its Console Operating System (COS) in ESXi, and will do the same in future versions of ESX, also because some customers continue to install 3rd party tools inside it, generating unnecessary support activity.