Hyper-V Replication in Backing Up State

Question

I replicate my production VMs with Hyper-V to another backup site. The servers at the backup site are also backed up using Disk2VHD.

I have noticed that when Disk2VHD is running, the backup site shows the replications are in backing up state and I can't perform any actions on them. Could the Disk2VHD be causing issues? Why does it keep going to backing up state? We have setup a scheduled job that runs a script to create a disk2vhd backup of all drives on each server and it runs at different times depending on the server. One server I see the job starts at 4AM but it is still running at 10.30AM. The Backup gooes to our QNAP Storage device which is on the same local network.

Disk2VHD is using a lot of bandwidth when I look at the ethernet performance. Is there better alternatives to disk2vhd that we can use instead? Would this be the reason for the backing up state?

Backup server is running Windows Server Standard 2022 and Primary is Windows Server 2019

Answer 1

Hello

Thank you for your question and reaching out. I can understand you are having issues related to Hyper-V Replication.

Yes Disk2vhd uses VSS ( Volume Shadow Copy ) due to which VM state may changed to back up while Disk2vhd running.
Also it may take more of resources like Disk I/O or Memory while running.

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Answer 2

What can I do to stop this happening? is there an alternate to Disk2VHD I can use that won't cause this?

Answer 3

I know this is old now, but I am using windows backup and for the duration of the windows backup, replication of that server stops. It will self heal after the windows backup is done, but when you are backing up 4tb of data to a usb v2.x it going to take a couple of days. Meanwhile, replication is stopped so talk about a wide open hole for catastrophe. Because of this, we are also using extended replication, but there are situations like right now that I have 2 physical servers doing full backups that will take 2 days to complete and my replication is now fubar until windows backup completes. Lets hope I don't need to fail over.

Why does Microsoft stop replication during windows backups and more importantly fix it so it does not.