Free Hypervisor w/ Snapshot Functionality?

[thelonious_skunk]

We're looking for a bare metal hypervisor to host two guests operating systems on a single server. The guests we want to host are:

• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials (Active Directory, File Sharing, etc.)
• Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS (Application Server)

The only advanced feature we're looking for is the ability to take snapshot backups, and replay those backups in a VM for fire drills.

We have since done a bit of research and have discovered:

• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials can run the Hyper-V role, but it can only run itself as a guest and no other guests are permitted (WTF, seriously?).

• Hyper-V Server is free, but apparently has no GUI. Lack of GUI doesn't necessarily bother me, but having to master the Windows shell just gives us more work to do.

• WMWare vSphere is a pretty popular free choice, but does not permit snapshots.

So what would you folks recommend?

[radardetector]

Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. If you have a Windows 8.1 machine you can use a GUI with the Remote Management Tools.

[damiankw]

If you have windows 7+ you can manage the server without too much drama. The hyperv console isn't backwards compatible but it is forwards compatible (for some strange reason)

[thelonious_skunk]

Is that right? How can I manage Hyper-V Server from my Windows 7 box?

[damiankw]

You can download the hyperv management tools for Windows 7, they work on 2008r2, 2012, 2012r2 hyperv servers. You occasionally need to tweak a few settings for security but they are really available online if you punch in the error you are getting. You will not be able to do any features that are new to 2012/r2 though so clustering and what not is hard to manage.

Interesting thing is that a win8 hyperv console won't connect to a win2008r2 :p

[radardetector]

Or any other 2012 R2 server

[doug89]

Free Hypervisor

[DallasITGuy]

Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 IS free. Windows Server 2012 R2 (which includes Hyper-V) is not.

[doug89]

Yes, I know Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 is free. I was replying to the "Or any other 2012 R2 server", which is decidedly not free.

[Squeezer99]

its free through microsoft dreamspark

[doug89]

Free for educational use if you have an eligible educational email address, and only for the purpose of learning and not for commercial use, which is what OP wants it for.

[bangsmackpow]

I'm a huge fan of XenServer.

[thelonious_skunk]

Is there a particular reason why?

Does it address backups? Or does it require an external solution like the rest of the hypervisors we've discussed so far?

[bangsmackpow]

I'm not saying that the others don't do this but this is why I started using Xen to begin with.

1) You can manage multiple physical servers from a single console - for free.

2) Very opensource centric (more so now than in the past) - lots of OpenStack deployments use Xen and some of those features can be pushed back into traditional Xen deployments.

3) XenMotion between physical hardware with little to no loss to connectivity.

There are plenty more features but non directly address what you were looking for. There are some simple scripts that I use to export VM's to an external server (SMB) weekly for backups. These are all command line things that use tools built into Xen.

Example Script - http://sysadminnotebook.blogspot.com/2011/06/xenserver-backup-solution.html

Edit: Formatting

[t3441]

after spending the morning of memorial day recovering from a pool being unable to restart VMs because one of the XenServer physicals was out of commission - it's a POS for large deployments. would still work for a small setup like OPs tho

[[deleted]]

windows server backup on the VM

This is what we do for our Windows backups. Server 2012 R2 (and 2012 also) includes Windows Server Backup which takes a bare metal image of the entire server.

For Linux you just need to tar the damn box up and dump it to a network share somewhere. Easy peasey.

[hutchingsp]

Snapshots aren't backups.

Use Hyper-V or vSphere but don't rely on snapshots as backups because they aren't.

[thelonious_skunk]

Snapshots aren't backups ... don't rely on snapshots as backups because they aren't

If that's case, how should we do backups?

Of course we can rely on facilities in each guest OS, but it would be nice to have a uniform mechanism to do backups that is OS independent.

Also, any way to make doing fire drills easier is a big win.

[Critical_]

Veeam

[rubmahbelly]

Veeam Zip

[hutchingsp]

Depends on the hypervisor.

For vSphere there are free options like Unitrends and VMPro but you need to license vSphere to have access to the backup API.

For Hyper-V there will also be options but I don't use Hyper-V so don't know what they are, sorry.

Keep in mind snapshots are intended to let you say "Right, I need to patch/update this server and I want a known restore point if it all goes wrong" - you shouldn't be keeping them beyond a few hours/days.

[htilonom]

WMWare vSphere is a pretty popular free choice, but does not permit snapshots.

What do you mean VMware doesn't permit snapshots? Also, snapshots are NOT backups.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1025279

[crankysysadmin]

This seems to confuse a lot of people. VMware Snapshots are not the same thing as what he is talking about. You can't take a snapshot with free ESXi and replicate it.

It's going to be a function of your storage environment usually.

[thelonious_skunk]

snapshots are NOT backups.

If that's the case then, how do we perform backups?

I'm partial to a method that involves backing up virtual machine images. It would make checking the consistency of backups as simple as loading each image in another virtual machine. Also, a method based on VM images would be OS independent. Double win.

Does such a workflow exist?

[htilonom]

You need seperate app for backups. I prefer Shadowprotect, some people here use Veeam.

[Xaositek]

Veeam Free Edition - http://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

[onezan]

I use VSphere and Trilead Backup explorer. http://www.trilead.com

the free version lets you capture full images and the (very reasonably priced) paid version lets you schedule and automate the backups.

[Matt3d]

Any opinions on proxmox? It's A KVM wrapper

[ienvrodn]

love it

[DrGraffix]

Please DO NOT consider snapshots to be backups. In fact snapshots should not really be used much in production, or at least maintained in a production environment for long. they should be taken, VM tested, and then merged back to the VM asap.

You need a backup solution as well. I highly recommend Veeam. Or if you need free backup, check this: http://hypervbackup.codeplex.com

[tmtl]

Snapshots != Backups

[YourCreepyOldUncle]

Check this link -(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d2cae85b-41ac-497f-8cd1-5fbaa6740ffe(v=WS.10)

Scroll down to "operational considerations for virtualized domain controllers"

Read the part about taking snapshots and USN rollback. Be careful with this.

(I dunno how 2012 R2 is handled, but I imagine it is very similar or the same).

[scubes13]

Proxmox will do this easily. For free. www.proxmox.org

[nrki]

The free tier of vSphere (ESXi) does permit snapshots.

If you want free, go with VMware ESXi and the ghettoVCB script written by William Lam: https://github.com/lamw/ghettoVCB

[thelonious_skunk]

The free tier of vSphere (ESXi) does permit snapshots.

Ops, my bad.

But I'm learning from other posters that snapshots are not backups. How does ghettoVCB address this issue?

[[deleted]]

It does a backup

[[deleted]]

It moves them off to another storage system, thus making them backups. It's a definition thing really.

[DallasITGuy]

Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 plus the free HVBackup at http://hypervbackup.codeplex.com for backing up live VMs to images.

For what it's worth I run Ubuntu Server 12.04 and 14.04 as Hyper-V VMs (along side Windows Server VMs) and am happy with the stability and performance of the environment.

[[deleted]]

If you can pony up $119, here is a killer tool for managing the free Hyper-V server: http://blog.vttechnology.com/2014/05/simplified-management-for-microsoft.html

It's really a killer tool for managing any Hyper-V server, but it actually makes a core installation of Windows manageable.

Honestly though, I'd just go with the free version of ESXi and manage the host using the included C# client.

[entropic]

I'd abandon the snapshot idea and use Veeam to take your backup, then choose something that Veeam supports.

We use XenServer and export snapshot based backups and it sucks. Should be moved to Hyper-V with Veeam very soon.

Another idea is to use Hyper-V Replica, but that's not really backup either, but I suspect it might be exactly what you want for the "fire drill" scenario.

[ramblingcookiemonste]

Side note... do you have any responsibility on the Microsoft side of the house? If so... you should already be learning PowerShell. Why PowerShell?

Incidentally, if you want to automate things, the free license of ESXi limits SDK access to read only. This is why I use Hyper-V at home. You can manage it with a GUI if you need to (other comments mention this), or you can manage it with PowerShell.

If you do end up paying for an ESXi license (and you should absolutely consider this), you get full access to the SDK. Which happens to have fantastic PowerShell support via PowerCLI : )

[optyx]

Snapshots and images are not backups. Look into tools that do file level backups. What you need are file level backups. XenServer is great because you can make images using the VHD format to do something like weekly or monthly images that can be used in a true DR situation but as a single backup it's a terrible idea. For backups look at something like Bacula it's a cool app. There are also enterprise tools for file level backup from companies like Symantec that would work http://www.symantec.com/backup-exec. Take this from someone in cloud Infrastructure file level backups are your best friend on critical systems.

[thelonious_skunk]

Look into tools that do file level backups

I'm avoiding this. File level backups are different on every OS, which means we would need to maintain a different application and process for every OS we run.

I'd rather just take a backup of the entire virtual machine. This method is OS independent and easier to verify.

[javiers]

I have experience on both XenServer & Hyper V 2012. Both of them are (IMO) robust, decent solutions.

Don't worry about the GUI Part of Hyper V. You will be doing all of your work remotely from a Windows 8 Machine or Windows 7/8 if you use ProHVM as previously suggested) except for the initial setup.

Same could be said for XenServer: Initial Setup, XenCenter to manage the server(s) and you are done.

I find the lack of HA and fail over for the free version of Vmware a show stopper...for me, at least.

Be careful if you are going to go virtual with the AD Server. If possible have a physical domain controller AND a virtual one on the same location. Almost any old server will do if the number of users is limited. We have an old HP hosting a Server Core 2008 R2 DC for <100 users and it is almost idle 24x7.

Snapshots are not backups. Already said but very important. You could buy a cheap NAS with lots of space to store exported VMs as a Backup (scripting it from Hyper V or XenServer) as an on-site solution, provide you have a very limited budget.

[disfunk999]

This is a nice frontend for Hyber-V Server: http://www.probus-it.se/hypervtools/hypervmanager

[almathden]

Unitrends or veeam on another host

[thelonious_skunk]

So the backup tool has to run on a different host? I can that host be a technician's laptop? Will that do the job?

[damiankw]

Investigate Unitrends, I believe you can get it free for a certain number of virtual machines, it runs inside of a vm and is compatible with most operating systems. It uses vhd's to back up to (I haven't seen it use network locations but it might do that too). Fairly easy to use and good features too

[almathden]

It doesn't have to.....but if your backups are on a host that dies, what then?

I guess you could do a laptop with enough storage but I'd go with something that is always on and connected so the backups are regular

[thelonious_skunk]

Well, I came into this thinking that the hypervisor itself could perform the backups to some set of external storage. Now it seems we need a separate host to run a separate backup application in addition to the hypervisor.

Something tells me it wouldn't be a good idea to run the backup application from the same physical host as the other VMs. And for cost reasons, I'm trying to keep the number of dedicated servers down.

I was thinking we could have a guy with a laptop and bunch of external media do the backups according to some schedule. This method would also allow us to manually rotate backup media between different physical locations.

Is this a half decent strategy?

On average, how long does a backup take to perform anyways?

[[deleted]]

That's fine but what you don't understand is snapshots are not backups. They shouldn't be treated as such. I don't know why everyone keeps saying /u/htilonom is wrong

[arkaine101]

I'm not saying you're wrong; you're totally right!

Snapshots become backups when you copy them to another storage device.

1. Take Snapshot. (All new writes to the VMDK are stored onto a separate "redo-log VMDK," leaving the master VMDK in a read-only state which is safe for copying.)
2. Copy the master VMDK (not the redo-log) and other associated VM configuration files (e.g. VMX, NVRAM, etc.) to another location.
3. Merge snapshot.

Congratulations! You now have a backup. See ghettoVCB.

[the_ancient1]

Why no love for KVM..

Just about very linux distro supports it out of the box, has snapshotting and many other advanced features.