I recently migrated from SBS 2008 to Essentials 2012 R2. My Essentials server is running as a Hyper-V VM on a Server 2012 R2 Standard host. I have a second virtual machine on the same host, running Server 2012 R2 Standard. I researched the backup options for Hyper-V and found that it is recommended to do the backup on the host. Just as a test run, I tried this with Windows Server Backup. I selected just one of the virtual machines. The backup was successful. So then I tried to run the backup with the entire host and including the virtual machines. Everything was backed up EXCEPT the virtual machines. In fact the three items that returned errors were:
VM001 (Online) - the component was skipped during the snapshot and will not be available for recovery. Error: Windows cannot create a shadow copy on the specified disk. Please choose another disk.
VM002 (Offline) - Windows Backup cannot find the shadow copy of the source volume.
Host Component - Windows Backup cannot find the shadow copy of the source volume.
I had shut down VM002 before trying the backup. Does the error mean that all VMs being backed up have to be running?
And why can't I backup any of the VMs now? Even if I try just one of them and nothing else in the backup, it still fails. For example, when I tried to backup just VM001, it fails with this error: "No valid component or volume to snapshot".
I thought perhaps it was because I was doing the backup to a USB 3.0 disk that had other stuff on it. So I bought another USB 3.0 disk that is completely blank, and to be used just for this purpose.
Note that I have backup enabled inside of VM001. However, that is useless to me if I can't boot VM001. The only reason I do it is because I haven't found a way to backup the entire virtual machine from the host.
Any pointers would be much appreciated.
JeHarry