Do others back up their Hyper-V nodes?

[localzuk]

So, I'm currently pondering whether it is necessary to back up the host nodes in our Hyper-V cluster?

 

We back up our VMs anyway, but I'm questioning whether there's any actual value to backing up the Hyper-V nodes themselves.

 

For restoration purposes, I can't see it actually helping really.

 

What do others think? What do you do?

[strawberry]

I don't, its quicker to reinstall than it is to restore.

[sparkeh]

No can't see the point. Our nodes are minimal installations so much quicker to reinstall than to try and restore.

[sonofsanta]

Nope. Reinstall Windows, add Hyper-V role, add Failover Cluster feature, job done. There's a bit of faff around order of installation with network teaming etc. but I have notes.

[localzuk]

The issue I'm thinking of is the fact our cluster uses SMB3.0 for its storage, so the cluster setup is a little longer than with iSCSI or DAS etc...

[sonofsanta]

I suppose there's no harm - the flipside of it being a minimal install is that there's a minimal footprint on your backup media. Take a bare metal recovery, if it turns out to be useless, nothing lost as you can rebuild from scratch. You might have to be cautious with your exceptions though - the ClusterStorage storage mount point in C: would need leaving well alone, for example.

[strawberry]

might be worthwhile to see if you could script the install instead, that way no backups and you can deploy as many nodes as you like to whatever hardware you like.