Hyper-V Replica: Better Than DR, it’s Disaster Avoidance and Way More!

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Hyper-V Replica was introduced in with Windows Server 2012, and is one of those transformational features that completely alters how disaster recovery planning (mundane) and implementation (formerly REALLY expensive) should be handled.

I like to think that one of the “target” scenarios for Hyper-V Replica was disaster avoidance - rather than simply disaster recovery (DR) – the ability to move a VM or service far away from an anticipated threat BEFORE it causes an outage.  The perfect example being natural disasters like hurricanes…with hurricane Sandy being a great example of how the built-in capabilities of Hyper-V Replica can keep things running:  Hyper-V Replica and Hurricane Sandy.

Hurricanes don’t hit our data centers and work locations every day.  More commonly other “disasters” strike… things like drive failures, water leaks, or well meaning janitors who trip over a power cord. 

Have you thought about Hyper-V replica and how it could help avoid or limit outages in other scenarios?  

  • In branch offices / retail store locations (for example) have you avoided deploying Hyper-V or VMware clusters to improve availability because of the high-cost and complexity of shared storage?  You can use Hyper-V Replica without shared storage to provide local failover, as well as centralized backup!
  • What about using Hyper-V Replica for your development environment…why not turn it on to get backup copies of VMs with multiple, VSS consistent recovery points without a lot of muss or fuss?

There are lots of great scenarios enabled by Hyper-V Replica – more than I could possibly conceive.

I’m going to spend some time walking through various scenarios over the next few posts, as well as how I might "automate” things like monitoring via PowerShell.  I’m not an expert on Hyper-V Replica, but I see it’s value, and have received LOTS of questions about it from people who are beginning to understand it’s power. 

If you have any suggestions, comments, or questions please don’t hesitate to ping me.

-John