Hyper-V Replica New Features and Backup
(The image above represents an example of replication and replicas – the theoretical cloning of people. We’ll stay with this theme in our images over the next few posts.)
In our last post we talked about Hyper-V new features and promised that in this post we’d explore the new features of Hyper-V replica specifically. These include
- Seamless upgrade. You can replicate virtual machines from WS2012 to WS2012 R2 using cross-version live migration.
- Granular VM replication frequency of 30 seconds, 5 minutes, or 15 minutes. You now can set your replication frequency to 30 seconds, 5 minutes, or 15 minutes.
- 24 recovery points. You now have up to 24 recovery points spaced at one hour intervals (a 50% improvement from WS2012’s limitation of 16 recovery points.)
- Linux GOS (Guest Operating System) support. In WS2012 R2 Hyper-V Linux is getting what Windows previously had – support for file system consistent snapshots and IP address injection in failover.
- Extended replication. Replication may be extended (chained) from the primary disaster recovery site to a secondary disaster recovery site.
- Performance. Microsoft spent a lot of time and energy on performance and has been able to lower the IOPS (I/O Operations Per Second) and decrease the storage resoruces required on the Hyper-V replica server.
- HRM (Hyper-V Recovery Manager. HRM is a Windows Azure service for the management of DR workflows between the on premise (primary) data center and the DR (secondary) data center. So you might think that HRM allows replication into Azure, right? Wrong! HRM is essentially a “management head” for replication between two sites.
Pretty exciting from the standpoint of disaster recovery, right? So does this mean that Hyper-V replica is a suitable alternative for backup? We’ll discuss that in our next post.
Anyone out there using Hyper-V replica and had good or bad experiences? We’d love to hear from you.
