HyperV - Copy Virtual Machines

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rosco

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I am looking to make copies of two production virtual machines and then take them to a offsite location to run on a HyperV server at that location that will be used for disaster recovery purposes.

The plan is to then use backups/restore to keep the data on the offsite DR HyperV server up to date.

What is the best way for me to copy the virtual machines (two windows server 2012 VMs) to a external drive or network storage so I can then physically take them to the other location to restore?

Thanks for the help!
 
How large are they? You could use Hyper-V Replication to send them over the wire. The data will be compressed when it's sent and you can have the machines sync up every few minutes or hours.

However, you'll want to keep an eye on the replication. It doesn't natively alert you if replication stops.

Couple that with local backups and you'll be good to go.
 
One is 700GB and the other is 162GB. So, I will probably need to copy them over manually.

With syncing, are they the exact same virtual machine? Is their computer name the same? Just wondering how that would work as far as having two computers on the network named the same thing. Syncing might make sense once I get the VMs setup at the remote location if it is only new data that has to replicate.

Sorry, I'm new to this aspect of virtual machines.
 
It will be a clone of the production VM. It won't be turned on unless you stop replication and power up the replicated VM.
 
OK, thanks.

So, is powering down the VMs and then copying them over to a network share at the same location, then copying it to a USB drive to carry to the other site the best way to get my initial copy of the VM then? Or, having the VM do a backup to a network share?

If the VM is imported that method can I then setup replication to keep them syncronized moving forward?
 
Yes you can tell it to replicate to a local external drive, bring to the remote site, then replicate changes from there.
 
Can it replicate to a shared network folder or a mapped network drive?

Any advantage of having it replicate initialy vs just shutting down the virtual machine and copying the whole virtual disk over to a network folder?
 
veeam? ;)

rosco said:
I am looking to make copies of two production virtual machines and then take them to a offsite location to run on a HyperV server at that location that will be used for disaster recovery purposes.

The plan is to then use backups/restore to keep the data on the offsite DR HyperV server up to date.

What is the best way for me to copy the virtual machines (two windows server 2012 VMs) to a external drive or network storage so I can then physically take them to the other location to restore?

Thanks for the help!
Click to expand...
 
Olga-SAN said:
veeam? ;)
Click to expand...
Veeam has advantages if you do this a lot but we're talking about only two VM's and the native replication does work rather well under Hyper -V in these instances. Also, it's quite easy to troubleshoot, I think they actually did replication fairly well in Hyper-V.
 
One issue I'm running into. I'm still planning out exactly how I want to do this and I read that you are not supposed to use Hyper-V replication on a SQL server. One of my VMs is a SQL server.

What would you recommend for that situation?
 
No, it's fine.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...ning-in-a-hardware-virtualization-environment


SQL Server on Hyper-V Replica is supported provided the EnableWriteOrderPreservationAcrossDisks flag is set.

Note To set the EnableWriteOrderPreservationAcrossDisks flag, run the following cmdlet:

Set-VMReplication -VMName <vm-name> -EnableWriteOrderPreservationAcrossDisks 1

Exceptions

If multiple SQL VMs are tightly coupled with one another, individual VMs can failover to the disaster recovery (DR) site but SQL high availability (HA) features inside the VM need to be removed and re-configured after VM failover. For this reason, the following SQL Server features are not supported on Hyper-VM Replica:
  • Availability Groups
  • Database mirroring
  • Failover Cluster instances
  • Log shipping
  • Replication
 
I second Hyper-V replicas if you are running 2012 R2; IIRC it wasn't the most reliable in 2012.

If you don't need instant failover or running 2008r2, then regular backup agents with high compression and differentials would work well (eg Evault).
 
I don't need instant failover. This would be a disaster recovery situation where it would take time (hours) to move people to the other office and get setup.

I just have 1 SQL server running as 1 VM and a application server that uses the SQL server as another VM.

I did verify that my source server is 2012 R2 so both of them are 2012 R2.

One thing I like about the hyper-v replication method is it's included/free. Nothing else to buy or install. So, as long as it's reliable in R2, that seems like the way to go.
 
With Hyper-v replication, can you specify a window of time that it does it's replication? Just so it won't use up a big chunk of our bandwidth during business hours.
 
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