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An online (running) ESX/ESXi virtual machine that has an independent disk or an RDM disk attached
in the physical compatibility mode cannot be backed up from the host. To back up such machine or
its disks, either stop the machine or install Agent for Windows or Agent for Linux on the machine.
Virtual machine backup vs. physical machine backup
Backing up an entire virtual machine or its volumes yields a standard disk backup (p. 414). With
Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Agent for Windows or Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Agent for Linux,
you can mount its volumes, recover individual files from this backup, and recover disks and volumes
from the backup to a physical machine.
Similarly, you can recover disks or volumes from a physical machine backup created with the Agent
for Windows or the Agent for Linux, to a new or existing virtual machine using either of the agents
for virtual machines. Hence, physical to virtual and virtual to physical machine migration becomes
available.
Guest operating systems
The following guest operating systems are supported.
Microsoft Windows platform:
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2
Microsoft Vista
Microsoft Windows Server 2008
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
Microsoft Windows 7
Linux platform.
Guest HDD
The following virtual disk configurations are supported.
Partitioning style: MBR
Volume types: basic and dynamic volumes.
Dynamic volumes (LDM in Windows and LVM in Linux) are supported to the same extent as on
physical machines. The LDM/LVM structure needs to be created prior to the recovery if you want to
retain the LDM/LVM. To do so, you will have to boot the target virtual machine using bootable media
(p. 411) or its ISO image and use Acronis Disk Director Lite for LDM reconstruction or Linux command
line tools for LVM reconstruction. Another option is to recover dynamic volumes as basic.
Troubleshooting
Agent: Agent for Hyper-V
Issue: Backup of an online virtual machine fails because of a Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)
error. The error can be seen in the Application Event Log (Event ID = 8193).
Cause: This happens because there is no registry key:
