[sc:windows-category ]With the migration from VMWare Server 2 to Hyper-V a slight changed had to occur in the configuration of the VM’s disks, namely that VMWare by default uses SCSI disks while Hyper-V requires IDE disks to boot from.
This isn’t much of a problem during the conversion process as Windows 2008 has all the drivers it needs for either SCSI or IDE booting. Hyper-V supports SCSI disks for data storage, however since I was moving the boot disks to IDE, I moved my data disks to IDE as well.
On most of my VM’s this was not an issue as I had a single boot volume and a second disk for Windows Server Backup to use for storage. The exception was my Exchange server which had two data disk (OS and Exchange DB) as well as the backup volume.
When I tried to install the Exchange backup volume on the second IDE controller, Hyper-V complained it was already in use (which it wasn’t) so I instead added the VHD to the SCSI controller.
After finishing the conversion of the Exchange VM and letting it run for a couple of days I check the backups, which were running fine. I didn’t bother checking the backups on the other VM until this week. On the rest of the servers, backups were failing with an “Unknown media type” error.
Windows Server Backup could see the backup volume and the associated backups but couldn’t add new backups to it.
The solution was pretty straight forward, simply going in to Windows Server Backup and modifying the existing backup schedule, without actually changing any values, rewrote the backup config with the new IDE based backup volume. Backups then proceed as expected without error.
