Using Hyper-V Replica Cloud Orchestration for
Automated Failover with Azure Site Recovery
Hyper-V Replica is a great technology, but as you have seen, it’s very manual. You
trigger the failover for each virtual machine. There is no automated or bulk failover
capability. Most organizations don’t want an automated DR failover because there are
too many false positives that could trigger a DR failover. What organizations do want
is the ability to perform an orchestrated disaster-recovery failover, allowing scripts to
be run, VMs to be failed over in a specific order, and all of this performed from a
single interface using predefined failover plans.
Like all of Windows Server, PowerShell can be used for every aspect of Hyper-V
Replica. You can use it to craft your own solution to perform your Hyper-V Replica DR
failover, but that would be a lot of work, and each time you added new virtual
machines, you would have to update your process.
Microsoft released some Hyper-V Replica runbooks that leverage System Center
Orchestrator to enable an orchestrated failover process. They are available from
[http://blogs.technet.com/b/privatecloud/archive/2013/02/11/ automation-](http://blogs.technet.com/b/privatecloud/archive/2013/02/11/ automation-)
orchestrating-hyper-v-replica-with-system-center-for-planned-failover.aspx. While a
nice solution, System Center Orchestrator is really focused on Windows Server 2012
and has not been updated for Windows Server 2012 R2 and beyond; still, it’s a great
starting point.
A better solution is provided by the Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (ASR) solution. You
can find details at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/site-recovery/. In the
following section, I will walk you through its main capabilities, its integration with
Hyper-V Replica, and SCVMM, as well as how to get started.
Overview of Hyper-V Protection with Azure Site Recovery
Figure 8.11 shows the main architectural view of an ASR-based solution when using
Hyper-V Replica between on-premises locations. First notice that ASR is a service
provided by Microsoft Azure, and it acts as a cloud-based broker and orchestration
engine for Hyper-V Replica activities and failovers. The replication of the virtual
machines is still from the Hyper-V servers in datacenter 1 to the Hyper-V servers in
datacenter 2. No virtual machine storage replication happens to Microsoft Azure, at
least not in this scenario, and instead only Metadata of the Hyper-V configuration is
sent to Microsoft Azure to enable management.