Scenario:

Implement high availability and disaster recovery options in hyper-v

Hyper-v Replica is a feature which allows the administrator to create replicas of the virtual machines locally o remotely. The process is asynchronous, and the failover process is not automatic.

Hyper-v replica is based on checkpoints meaning only the changes performed on the primary server are checkpointed and replicated.

Basic Pre-requisites :

 

• Hyper-v Role must be installed on both servers
• Servers must be located after the same firewall
• Not part of a cluster
• Domain Joined Servers with trust relationship
• Kerberos auth

Configuring the firewall ( both ways )

We shall configure both window’s firewalls, in order to do so, run the following commands in both replicas on a PowerShell  console :

1. enable-netfirewallrule -displayname “hyper-v replica http listener (tcp-in)”
2. enable-netfirewallrule -displayname “hyper-v replica https listener (tcp-in)”

This configuration process is only required on the replica server, but you might want to consider configuring the primary server in the same way, in anticipation of a recovery from a failover situation.

Configuring the replica ( one direction ) 

We must configure the replication in one direction hence hyper-v. To do so we will perform this setup on the secondary server.

Select the following options

• Enable this computer as a Replica server
• Use Kerberos HTTP
• Allow replication from the specified servers ( will be DC2016 – Dc1) – Primary Server

On the Authorization and storage, we will instruct “allow replication from the specified servers, and add our primary server, in this case, DC2016.test.test

Also point out a replication group, in this case, we have called “Replica”.

note: Ensure to use the FQDN as displayed otherwise it will fail :

For now, we are done with the secondary server.Now let’s go to the primary server:

We can start the replica, right click on the VM hence “enable replication on the primary server”

Here we will specify the secondary server ( This case W2016DC2 )

Personalize your replication options & methods if required.

 

Now we are able to see the required replica of the other server:

 

We can now see new brand options on the “replication menu”