Chapter 8: Hyper-V Replica and Cloud Orchestration
Identify the best options to provide disaster recovery for the various
services in your organization. When planning disaster recovery, application-
aware disaster recovery should be used first where possible, such as SQL Always On,
Exchange DAG, Active Directory multimaster replication, and so on. If no application-
aware replication and DR capability is available, another option is to look at the
replication capabilities of the SAN, such as synchronous replication. Additionally,
replicating at the virtual machine disk level, such as with Hyper-V Replica, provides a
replication solution that has no requirements on the guest operating system or the
application.
Master It Why is Azure Site Recovery useful?
Solution Hyper-V Replica provides the replication of the virtual machine but does
not provide any enterprise management or failover orchestration. Azure Site
Recovery provides a cloud-based portal to enable enterprise-level configuration,
management, and execution of failover plans in a structured manner. Azure Site
Recovery also provides a target for replication with Microsoft Azure instead of an
on-premises location, if required, enabling DR to the cloud.Describe the types of failover for Hyper-V Replica. There are three types of
Hyper-V Replica failover. A test failover is performed on the replica server, and it
creates a clone of the replica virtual machine that is disconnected from the network
and allows testing of the failover process without any impact to the ongoing protection
of the primary workload as replication continues. A planned failover is triggered on
the primary Hyper-V host and stops the virtual machine, ensures that any pending
changes are replicated, starts the replica virtual machine, and reverses the replication.
An unplanned failover is triggered on the replica Hyper-V host and is used when an
unforeseen disaster occurs and the primary datacenter is lost. This means that some
loss of state may occur from the primary virtual machine. When possible, a planned
failover should always be used.
Master It In an unplanned failover, how much data could be lost?
Solution The Hyper-V Replica configuration specifies a time interval to perform
replication, which can be 30 seconds, 5 minutes, or 15 minutes. This relates to the
recovery point objective (RPO), which is the amount of data that can be lost. A
replication of 15 minutes means that potentially up to 15 minutes of data could be
lost, while a replication of 30 seconds means that the maximum amount of data
loss should be 30 seconds, provided that there is no network bottleneck that is
slowing down the transmission of replica log files.Explain the automated options for Hyper-V Replica failover. Hyper-V Replica
has no automated failover capability. To automate the failover steps, PowerShell could
be used, System Center Orchestrator could be used, or, for a complete solution, Azure