Production checkpoints for Hyper-V virtual machines in Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10

Windows Server 2016 slowly untied its veil, interested in downloading the latest launched Windows Server 2016 Technology Preview 4 , a subset of the virtual machine's capabilities are already open in virtual machines in Windows 10, one of which is the virtual machine production checkpoint (Production Checkpoint).

For the concept of checkpoints, perhaps we are all familiar with this feature that is not already available in Hyper-V? Note that the new product is called production checkpoint, then the corresponding function is the standard check Point (Checkpoint). Standard checkpoints and production checkpoints? A horse of God is different? As the name implies, the checkpoint feature is now available for production environments, and the previous checkpoint functionality is only suitable for development test environments, which is the biggest difference! Perhaps you have had problems creating Hyper-V virtual machine snapshots in a production environment, so check to see if this production environment checkpoint resolves these issues.

Do not know whether to notice before the boot state running checkpoint to restore the virtual machine is an open virtual machine, which has been explained that this snapshot is a memory for virtual machine memory instantaneous snapshot, and does not have a corresponding snapshot of the virtual machine disk status, in this case the state is not a consistent snapshot , it is likely to be problematic for a running part of the application, such as SQL Server,exchange, to be unable to run at the time of recovery, or even for backup recovery. Of course, this can be avoided by shutting down the virtual machine for consistent snapshots, but this also loses the significance of snapshots that do not need to shut down the virtual machine.

The difference in the production checkpoint is that it provides a consistent snapshot based on the Volume Shadow Copy service (Volume Shadow copy), which is the instantaneous disk volume checkpoint that is made to ensure that all in-memory (Microsoft) Dirty data writes are frozen after IO. This checkpoint data ensures a consistent, reliable, recoverable-state snapshot that is often used in most three-party backup software or San copies, and now Microsoft has added this capability to its own virtual machine services, and of course you may ask if the VSS used by this technology is not a Microsoft system service, What about Linux virtual machines? For Linux environments, the production checkpoint service provides file system-level data consistency, file system cache checkpoint submissions, and IO freezes to ensure consistency at the file system level. This snapshot, because it is a consistent snapshot at the storage level, naturally does not need to copy the memory device state information like the previous standard checkpoint snapshot; the recovery process, of course, does not contain memory state, so it is started from an offline state to recover. All include virtual machine-initiated systems that load memory procedures instead of direct memory snapshot recoveries in standard snapshots.

Depending on whether the system we are using is a development test or a production environment, we can choose which checkpoint method to use for the virtual machine snapshot through the virtual machine level settings. As shown in the following:

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From here we can also see that when production checkpoints cannot be completed, you can replace the snapshot operation by using a standard checkpoint. Sometimes the volume snapshot requires a certain amount of Io silence time, if the system is in frequent IO operation, it is possible to cause VSS can not capture the situation caused by the production checkpoint can not be created, when we have the choice of standard checkpoint to take the snapshot capture, the specific checkpoint mode selection can be Refer to MSDN for instructions .

If you prefer to use PowerShell to modify checkpoint mode and operate checkpoints, it is also necessary to be familiar with the operation of large environments.

To view the virtual machine current checkpoint settings:

Get-vm-name <YourVMName> | Select-expandproperty Checkpointtype

To set the virtual machine current checkpoint type properties:

SET-VM Name <YourVMName>-checkpointtype productiononly

* Note: The operation of the virtual machine requires a PowerShell session environment with administrator privileges.

Production checkpoints for Hyper-V virtual machines in Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10