Setting up Hyper-V replication requires preplanning

Hyper-V Replica can help you protect important VMs and data in the event of a disaster, but setting up Hyper-V replication can introduce problems if you don't take a few key steps.

The Hyper-V Replica tool provides free disaster recovery functions. If a crisis occurs, you can fail over to the replica VMs that the tool creates to re-establish business continuity. Hyper-V Replica replicates the delta changes of a primary VM to a secondary Hyper-V server hosted in a disaster recovery site. Setting up Hyper-V replication is easy, but a few pointers can make the process smoother and less prone to error.

Hyper-V Replica doesn't offer continuous replication, but instead provides a configurable replication interval. The interval is five minutes by default, but you can change it to 30 seconds. The changes to each Hyper-V Replica-enabled VM replicate to the secondary Hyper-V server according to the schedule you define when you set up Hyper-V replication.

To check for replication failures, you must execute PowerShell commands, use Hyper-V Manager or check the event viewer.

In addition, the tool doesn't offer a mechanism to send push notifications to warn you of the failure of replication-enabled VMs. To check for replication failures, you must execute PowerShell commands, use Hyper-V Manager or check the event viewer.

If you don't notice failures for a long enough period of time and the updated data from the primary VM isn't replicated to the secondary VM, you'll have a bad copy of the data at the disaster recovery site. This means you won't be able to restore your system if the primary VM goes down. It's better to head off this potential problem and plan a methodology when setting up Hyper-V replication to address failures as quickly as possible.

When setting up Hyper-V replication, make sure you count the copies that the Hyper-V primary server maintains for each VM. VMs can't have more than 15 Hyper-V Replica copies, which means that you can't restore a VM before the 15^th copy.