Hyper-V Reverse Replication to server without VMs

Question

Hello, I had server A replicating to server B. Sunday we had hardware failure on server A, so I used failover on server B and all has been fine. Traveled 6 hours to server A location, long story short we lost enough drives in the array that I had to create a new array and logical drive. The host server is fine, it was just the data disk where the VMs were stored that we lost. Hyper-V manager shows failed/stopped critical state for the VMs that were originally on the server. Question is can I use reverse replication from Server B to Server A and get them back, or will I need to use live migration to get them?

Answer 1

Hey,

You will need to perform failover to server B and then configure reverse replication to get data back to original server. The following article should help: https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/devops/containers-and-virtualization/a-practical-guide-to-microsoft-hyper-v-replica-part-ii/

As another option, you can also consider using StarWind VSAN to create replicated shared storage pools between your servers and create Failover Cluster to make your VMs highly available. The following guide covers the configuration process: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-for-hyper-v-2-node-hyperconverged-scenario-with-windows-server-2016/

Cheers,

Alex Bykovskyi

StarWind Software

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Answer 2

duplicated the answer

Answer 3

  Hi Mike, Thanks for your post. Based on my research, I think using reverse replication from Server B to Server A has less risk than using live migration, because the primary server still has risk and cannot guarantee the result of live migration. If the replication still not help, alternatively, you can manually move the virtual disks from the secondary host to the primary one and just resume replication.   Best Regards, Ian Xue

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