Contoso Hosting Solutions has deployed many private clouds with multiple Hyper-V hosts. Some of these are on clusters and some are on stand-alone hosts, depending on customer needs. Contoso has been using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V hosts for their deployments. As their customer service level agreements (SLAs) or density changes on a Hyper-V host, John, the administrator, switches off a virtual machine, moves the storage, and migrates it to a new host. This helps him load-balance better and adapt to customer needs. This process of migrating virtual machines to balance loads has, for a long time, been a pain point for John. However, thanks to the features available in Windows Server 2012, John does not need to use this cumbersome process anymore. Live migration of virtual machines solves his problem.
Bob, the backup administrator, manages the backup for Contoso’s Hyper-V deployments. Depending on the backup SLAs, recovery point objective (RPO), and recovery time objective (RTO), he configures backups of virtual machines. When he hears about John’s move to live migration of virtual machines, Bob worries about the complexity that this would bring to his data protection scenarios.
In the new environment, John deploys Client Hyper-V clustered and stand-alone, hosts. He also migrates some of the virtual machines from Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012. John deploys Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) in System Center 2012 SP1 to manage the private cloud.
To continue protection of the virtual machines, John adds all the backup administrators as Read Only users in VMM.
For his part, Bob pushes the System Center 2012 SP1 Data Protection Manager agents on to all Windows Server 2012 hosts. Then he installs the VMM client component on all the DPM servers. Next, using the DPM Windows PowerShell cmdlet Set-DPMGlobalProperty, he connects all the host computers to all the DPM servers. The Set-DPMGlobalProperty cmdlet now accepts multiple DPM server names to allow him to do this easily.
Bob now configures the backups by creating protection groups in DPM. A week later, when a virtual machine migrates from one cluster to another, all backups continue without breaking.
By implementing the following System Center 2012 SP1 components together, and with minimal configuration, you can use:
For the Microsoft cloud strategy, see the Private Cloud Solution Hub, where architectural guidance is located. The strategy describes how a private cloud enables organizations to deliver information technology (IT) as services. It does this by providing a pool of computing resources that are delivered as a standard set of capabilities. The capabilities are specified, architected, and managed based on requirements that a private organization defines.
To prepare your environment for this solution, review the guidance in the System Center 2012 Integration Guide on the Microsoft TechNet Wiki. There, you can review community information for each System Center component in its role as a programmable platform to be used for the Microsoft Private Cloud. The guide is intended to provide an abstraction layer that guides partners and customers in their decision process for building automated solutions across System Center components and between System Center and other systems.
Deploy DPM to support protection of virtual machines that have Live Migration enabled. Deploy virtual machines with Live Migration.
On the protected computers:
On the DPM server: