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SMB is getting a lot of attention with Windows Server 2012, and we’ve had questions from a few customers regarding the inter-play between SMB shares and Hyper-V Replica. In this post we’ll share our experience around setting up and using various configurations involving SMB shares and Hyper-V Replica...

We are excited to see the release of XenDesktop 7 and support our partner Citrix. XenDesktop 7 brings together both XenApp and XenDesktop functionality into a common release and now brings support for Windows Server 2012. XenDesktop can easily be deployed on Hyper-V and take full advantage of Windows...

Customers have frequently asked us for capacity planning guidance before deploying Hyper-V Replica – e.g.: “How much network bandwidth is required between the primary and replica site”, “How much storage is required on the primary and replica site”, “What is the storage impact by enabling multiple recovery...

What is resynchronization and why is it needed? Hyper-V Replica provides protection to VMs by tracking and replicating changes to the virtual hard disks (VHDs) of the VM. Hyper-V Replica runs 24 hours, 365 days in a year; for any VM that has been enabled for replication it ensures that the data on the...

We have had a number of queries on how to enable replication using certificates created from makecert. Though the Understanding and Troubleshooting guide for Hyper-V Replica discusses this aspect, I am posting a separate article on this. The below steps are applicable for a simple lab deployment consisting...

In a mixed language environment where the server name or domain name contains international characters, you might encounter an error at the time of enabling replication. The event viewer messages will tell you that “Hyper-V failed to enable replication for virtual machine” and “The server name or address...

Windows Server 2012 introduces fundamental improvements that make it a cloud-ready operating system. The capabilities provide a flexible and scalable solution which opens up a wide range of opportunities for hosting providers to build new cloud services. This blog post is co-authored by Uma Mahesh...

As part of setting up a replication relationship, Hyper-V Replica transfers the initial VHDs over the network – depending on the size of the VHD, this operation can be time consuming and also impacts your production network. Once initial replication is completed, Hyper-V Replica tracks the changes to...

System Center 2012 Orchestrator provides a powerful workflow management solution which allows IT administrators to automate different tasks exposed by the platform. At the heart of the Orchestrator is a set of Runbooks which outline the sequence of activities for a given task. A number of resources are...

David is one of our Premier Field Engineers and he approached us with an interesting problem where the customer was encountering a Kerberos error when trying to create a replication relationship. On first glance, the setup looked very straight forward and all our standard debugging steps did not reveal...

Hey, it's Lalithra again. In the last part , we talked about what resource metering is. Now, we’ll get into how to use it with PowerShell. A quick note: if this is your first foray into PowerShell, here are some resources you may find helpful to go through. First, a couple of posts from the...

Hi, I’m Lalithra Fernando, a program manager on the Hyper-V team, working in various areas including clustering and authorization, as well as with our Hyper-V MVPs. In this post, I’ll be talking about resource metering, a new feature in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012. As you’ve probably...

We have seen multiple queries on the steps required to create the Hyper-V Replica Broker using Powershell, a previous post describes the process but adding more details on the end to end workflow. To create a Hyper-V Replica Broker in a DHCP environment, use the following cmdlets: 1: #Specify the name...

In the first part of this 3-part series, you learnt about Test Failover. In this part, I will talk about the Planned Failover (PFO). 1. What is Planned Failover? PFO is an operation initiated on the primary VM which allows you to do an e2e validation of your recovery plan. PFO requires the VM to be shut...

If you are wondering “ I have enabled replication and it looks like everything is in progress, but how do I know that I am truly protected ”, then keep reading the next few posts as we walk you through the various types of failover, how and when to use them and the gotchas in different deployments. At...

When you enable replication on a virtual machine, the Replica virtual machine files are created under the location specified by you in the Replica server configuration on the Replica side. Under the specified location, the files are created under a folder structure that looks like: The folders...

This post discusses a subtle change in the certificate workflow for Hyper-V Replica in Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate build and beyond. Note : The pre-requisites certificate based authentication remains unchanged (as seen in an earlier post “ Hyper-V Replica - Prerequisites for...

In an earlier post , we discussed the steps required to get a certificate from a Standalone CA or from a third party CA. For an Enterprise CA , the INF file needs to be modified and suitable templates need to be available to honor the certificate request. To make things interesting, the post is written...

While the concept of an “Authorization table” remains the same between Windows Server “8” Beta (as explained in an earlier post ) and Windows Server 2012 RC, we have made some changes in the PowerShell cmdlet and UI surrounding this. The phrase ‘Security Tag’ in...

The certificate requirements for Hyper-V Replica were discussed earlier – this post provides details on how to request a certificate from a Certification Authority (CA), which can then be used for Hyper-V Replica for certificate based authentication. Step #1: Create an INF file Copy-paste the text below...

Continuing from where we left off the last time … Q1: The Replication Health pane has loads of information, how do I interpret these attributes? I thought you would never ask On both the Primary and Replica VM, the following attributes are displayed...

In Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate, Hyper-V administrators can monitor the ‘health’ of the replicating VMs using the Replication Health attribute . This property allows administrators to answer common questions such as: When did the primary and replica VMs last synchronize...

Posting this on behalf of Jeff Woolsey who delivered an amazing demo in the Day 1 Keynote address by Satya Nadella. The video is available here and the transcript for the keynote address is available here .   Some key takeaways from Jeff's presentation: 64 virtual processors in a VM 985,000 IOPs...