I got a call from a customer the other day who lost their Hyper-V host OS. He was reporting a network outage because his standalone hyper-v host was down and had taken most of his VMs with it.
Fortunately, we managed his company’s backups with a Datto Siris device. This backup appliance takes hourly snapshots of the company servers and keeps them safe and sound on the local Datto server. If a disaster should strike, we can mount the last backup image of the server as a virtual machine running on the Datto backup device. The users connect to the restored virtual server just like they would the original, crashed server.
The other great benefit of the Datto backup device is the offsite disaster recovery features. Not only does the datto take hourly snapshots of a company’s servers, but each night the backup appliance consolidates the daily backups and sends all the changes from the day to Datto’s bi-coastal data centers. If a major catastrophe such a s a hurricane or tornado were to hit a customer’s office building, we could log in to the Datto website and restore the customer’s latest backups as virtual machines in the cloud. The customer can then access their mission critical servers over a secure vpn connection.
Okay, done with the Datto info and back to my customer’s story. In this instance, the customer’s offices were fine and so was his Datto appliance. We were able to boot his mission critical servers on the local datto backup appliance and keep his company in business until his warranty parts could arrive.
Once the Hyper-V server was rebuilt, I scheduled some down time and exported the latest backups from the Datto appliance as virtual disk images. Then I attached those disk images to the Virtual Machines in Hyper-V and booted them up.
You never want to have to use your backup systems, but in this case Datto made it easy.