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Rob Waggoner |  |
When we built Hyper-V Replica for Windows Server 2012, our goal was to provide a low cost and easy to use Disaster Recovery (DR) solution for our customers. We’ve had a number of customers and partners setup Hyper-V Replica as a DR solution and now we hearing some of the post Hurricane Sandy stories and how these customers are still able to leverage their IT infrastructure even though their primary datacenters are under water! Here’s a note from one of our partners on the East Coast:
Good morning;
The Hurricane hit our area badly; many downed trees, even on my wife’s car. Flooding and total power cuts were everywhere.
We are very grateful that everyone is well.
I now want to thank the Microsoft 2012 server team for giving small to medium sized businesses the new replica feature.
Two of our clients (both whom cannot be without their IT infrastructure) were flooded entirely, and might take 2 weeks to get back into their businesses.
At 7pm last night we failed over their entire domains to the Replica site, and they have been able to continue their daily business with ZERO interruption.
“Windows Server 2012 saved their business”.
Kindest Regards.
Steve
Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V Replica provides a more economical way to replicate your critical infrastructure to a remote DR site that is out of harms way. By replicating the infrastructure (VMs) to the DR site, the business is now able to fail over to this remote site. Hyper-V Replica is allowing these businesses to get back up and running without data loss or availability issues. It may be a few weeks before their primary datacenter will be in any condition to host an IT infrastructure, but for now, our customers’ infrastructure is running in their DR site so they can continue to focus on running their business while their datacenter dries out.
Hyper-V Replica does not require an expensive storage infrastructure, it’s built into Windows Server 2012 and allows an administrator to select individual virtual machines that will be replicated to a remote server or remote site. Since Hyper-V Replica relies on the Windows Server infrastructure, you can replicate all of your virtual machines to remote sites; you can even send virtual machines from the same Hyper-V host to different servers or sites!
If you want to understand Hyper-V Replica, I created a blog and video here that shows you how to setup Hyper-V Replica and some of the capabilities it provides.
We also have additional material that discusses Hyper-V Replica:
- Enabling Disaster Recovery for Hyper-V Workloads Using Hyper-V Replica with Windows Server 2012 – https://training.partner.microsoft.com/learning/app/management/LMS_ActDetails.aspx?UserMode=0&ActivityId=812938
- Hyper-V Replica Overview on TechNet – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj134172.aspx
Until next time,
Rob