Dear, 

After migrating my Hyperv hosts to Server 2012 R2, i can see Offline and Online status for each VM

i understood that after after installing integration services, i will be able to have all machines online.

my question is:  what is the difference between both backup? what if i have a backup for Offline machines? is there any data loss ?

Thank you

Regards,

Karim

• Moved by BrianEhMVP Tuesday, March 24, 2015 3:33 PM

Hi Karim,

There is a few conditions that the VM need to meet before you can protect it with Online snapshots: 

• The Backup integration service must be enabled, so the operating system running on the virtual machine running must support Hyper-V integration services.

• The guest operating system must support VSS (Windows 2003 server or later). Online backup isnt supported if virtual machines are running Linux.

• There should be no dynamic disks on the virtual machine.

• All volumes must be NTFS

• The VSS storage assigment for the volumes shouldnt be modified.

• The virtual machine must be running, and if the virtual machine is in a cluster the cluster resource group should be online. A Shadow Storage assignment of a volume inside the virtual machine mustnt be explicitly set to a different volume other than itself.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh757970.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

If these conditions arent met:

DPM will perform an offline backup where the virtual machine is paused and placed in a saved state while the snapshot is taken, and then the virtual machine is resumed. This means the virtual machine is unavailable during the backup, usually a short period of less than a minute for many environments.

I hope this answers your question!

• Edited by MarkusEliasson Tuesday, March 24, 2015 3:40 PM
• Marked as answer by Karim Irani Tuesday, March 24, 2015 3:47 PM