I'm testing out scenarios of backing up and restoring our DC. One of the two DCs we have is a VM (running Server 2016) on a 2012R2 Hyper-V host.
The host is a bit outdated, but at the time we do not have resources to upgrade it.
Should something bad happen, the restore operation would likely be performed on a newer Hyper-V host. As such, I've been testing restore operations on my own Windows 10 machine with Hyper-V enabled, and I could NOT restore a bare-metal backup of the DC. Specifically, all attempts end with the 0x80070057 error. If I attempt the recovery on the original host (2012R2 that is) then it is successful. This, to me, suggests that the Hyper-V configuration version might be important here. Unfortunately, it's while it's possible to upgrade the configuration version for an imported machine, it's impossible to create a VM with an old configuration version from the get-go. But this seems to be what I need to perform the recovery.
Does this mean that bare-metal of an older Hyper-V VM can't be used on newer version of Hyper-V? This seems like a very VERY big oversight!
Alternatively, what's the best way to back up the DC for a potential critical scenario? (Ideally I'd like to have periodic, automatic backups in Azure...)