Hyper-V Resilient Change Tracking: What Is & How to Enable

An efficient backup and replication strategy is critical for virtual environments. In Microsoft Hyper-V, the feature RTC enhances operations such as backup and replication. Hyper-V Resilient Change Tracking is a powerful mechanism designed to improve the efficiency and reliability of virtual machine backups. In this article, we will provide a detailed explanation of what RTC is and how to enable it.

What is Hyper-V Resilient Change Tracking

Resilient Change Tracking (RTC) is a feature in Hyper-V that allows backup applications to track changes to virtual hard disks (VHDs) at the block level. This enables incremental and differential backups to be blockier, more efficient, and less prone to errors by enabling the next incremental backup of a virtual machine to be run with only the blocks that have changed being copied to storage.

Benefits of RTC

• Efficiency: Only changed blocks of data are backed up, reducing data transfer and storage usage.
• Performance: It minimizes performance impact on production workloads compared to traditional backup methods.
• Reliability: RTC is integrated into the Hyper-V platform and is more robust than older C technologies such as file system filter drivers.
• Resiliency: RTC is designed to handle system failures more gracefully. For example, it can recover traces after a crash or power failure.

How to Enable Hyper-V Resilient Tracking

RTC is automatically enabled on supported systems and does not need to be manually enabled in Hyper-V settings. Detailed steps to enable Hyper-V Resilient Change Tracking are provided in the following section.

Prerequisites for Using RCT

• Windows Server 2016 or later (including Windows 10/11 with Hyper-V role).
• VHDX format virtual disks (RTC does not work with older .vhd files).
• Backup application that supports RCT (such as AOMEI Cyber Backup).
• Integration Services installed and updated on the guest VM (usually handled automatically in newer Windows versions).

1. Use PowerShell to inspect the backup type

When a backup runs, you can inspect events or logs generated by your backup software.

You can also use:

Look for the .mrt and .rct files stored in the same folder as your VHDX file. These are RCT metadata files created during incremental backup runs.

2. Trigger a test backup with a compatible tool

Run an incremental backup with a tool that supports RCT. If RCT is working:

• Only changed blocks will be backed up.
• You will notice .rct and .mrt files being used alongside the VHDX.

Manage Hyper-V Environment with Efficient Backup Tool

AOMEI Cyber Backup is a reliable, powerful, and easy-to-use tool for managing your Hyper-V VMs. It is designed to protect virtual machines from security threats. It can utilize RCT to track changes at the data block level in Hyper-V environments, which can reduce backup time and storage requirements.

Agentless Hyper-V Backup: It can enable effective virtual machine backup at the Hyper-V host without the need to deploy agents on each virtual machine.

Centralized Management: It can create and manage Hyper-V VM backups from the central console, simplifying the VM backup and restore process.

Entire VM Restore: It can restore Hyper-V virtual machine backups to a different or the same Hyper-V host easily.

Email Notification: It can monitor Hyper-V backup status and send email notification when the task is completed or abnormal.

Easy steps to backup Hyper-V VMs

Step 1. In AOMEI Cyber Backup, access to Source Device > Hyper-V > Add Hyper-V to bind Hyper-V host, then enter the required information and click Confirm.

Step 2. Access to Backup Task > Create New Task to configure Hyper-V backup task. And perform the following steps:

• Device: Select virtual machines you want to back up on the Hyper-V host.
• Target: Select a local folder or network location (such as backup to NAS) to store the VM backup.

• Schedule: Select the backup method as full/incremental backup, then specify the time according to daily/weekly/monthly to automatically run the Hyper-V backup task.

Step 3. Click Start Backup and select Add the schedule and start backup now, or Add the schedule only.

Step 4. In addition to reliable Hyper-V VM backup, you can restore a VM from any selected backup history. It’s convenient to recover a VM by hitting Restore to original location when the Hyper-V VM fails.

Conclusion

Hyper-V Resilient Change Tracking transforms virtual machine backup policies, and RCT simplifies incremental backups and enhances data protection strategies by providing a reliable, local, and efficient change-tracking mechanism. Manage your Hyper-V environment with AOMEI Cyber Backup and ensure business continuity with RCT.