With today’s Covid-19 situation, many customers are in business continuity mode and yet need a highly reliable way to continue working. So you have Hyper-V Replica. It is an asynchronous, virtual machines replication technology that is designed for business continuity and disaster recovery.
Are you Using Hyper-V as your Hypervisor? blessed are you because Hyper-V since 2012 R2 have had possibly the best disaster recovery capability built-in at no additional cost. It is called Hyper-V Replica.
It allows you to replicate as many VMs from production site to DR site and even thereon to a 2nd DR site. In addition, you have 3 RPOs to choose from which are 30 seconds, 5 mins and 15 mins.
To Mitigate a rack failure:
Replicate the VMs from one rack to another using the 30 seconds RPO.
To Mitigate the site failure:
Replicate from this to another physical location using either the 5 minute or 15 minutes RPO.
The choice of 5 or 15 minutes RPO is entirely up to you. However, you cannot use 30 seconds because the 1st replication is already using it.
Hyper-V Replica works with
Any Server Vendor
Any Network Vendor
Any Storage Vendor
Also unlimited replication is available out of the box
Some people are initially confused about when to use Hyper-V Replica and when to use Hyper-
V live migration. Hyper-V Replica keeps up-to-date copies of your virtual machines in case of a
disaster, and allows you to switch to those copies when required. This is usually an unplanned
event.However, Hyper-V live migration is about planned events—
moving your virtual machines and their associated storage across different locations when
required.
Hyper-V Replica provides virtual machine replication for any of your servers, networks, or storage vendors. It does not require a failover cluster or any shared storage. You can replicate individual or multiple virtual machines.
You can replicate your virtual machines from one computer running Hyper-V at a primary site (the primary server) to another computer running Hyper-V at a Replica site (the Replica server). Keep in mind that your Replica server can accept incoming replication traffic from one or more primary servers.
