I’d say that one of the features I’m most excited about in Windows 8 is Hyper-V replica.  Microsoft may not be the first to create every technology, but they certainly have a habit of commoditizing technologies that people used to need to purchase separately.   Hyper-V replica is another example of this, since Microsoft is including in their free hypervisor a cross-site replication tool.  The best part is that Hyper-V replica is really easy to setup.  This guide gives you a walkthrough of those steps:

TARGET HOST

 You will need to start by configuring the target Hyper-V host to allow itself to be a replication target.  Start by selecting to view the Hyper-V settings on the server.

You will then configure the replication section with the replication authentication type, the port for the connection, certificate (if used), and the “allow list”.  You can select that any authenticated source can replicate to the host as well.

SOURCE HOST

 Find the virtual machine you’d like to replicate.  This can be either a clustered virtual machine or a standalone virtual machine.  Select the virtual machine and choose to “enable replication”.

Find the virtual machine to replicate, right click, and select “Enable Replication”.

Start the wizard and select “Next” to continue. 

Configure the replication target on the same port and security type of the destination server. 

Select the VHDs to replicate to the target.  This is typically all of the VHDs for the virtual machine.

Now… comes an awesome feature called recover history.  This allows the target system to maintain older copies of the VM that you can recover to. Select the number of intervals you want to retain on disk at the target location.

Configure the seeding of the target server.  You can either replicate the VM to the failover site, or move it with offline media.

AFTER CONFIGURATION

 After configuration you can configure failover features, such as IP addresses and can also initiate failover.  I’ll cover those in the next blog post.

 I hope you are as excited about this feature as I am.  Happy replicating!

Nathan Lasnoski

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