Replication Questions - Disaster Recovery

Question

I’ve got 2x DL360 Gen10 2019 “standard”servers. Both setup as RAID 10. Server1 is setup as a Hyper-V server hosting 4 vms (2016 servers) and roughly 15 TBs of data including an sql server that is the bulk of the data.

Server2 is identical to Server1; processor, ram, partitions,etc. This is a fresh server, only Hyper V installed. I have not moved/copied over any vms or data data, just installed a the same roles and applied some updates. Figured over a weekend I’d save off the VMs and import them into server2 and robocopy daily to sync data. Would this work?

My mission is to figure out a way to have the “in production” server1 in building A sync or mirror to server2 in building B (fiber). In the event of a disaster I’d be able to move server2 into production and keep folks working w/ minimal downtime. Servers are on the same domain, network, vlan and can see one another.

Is it possible to set server1 up to regularly sync everything including vms and their data to server2 in real-time or hourly/bi-hourly intervals using robocopy? Would DFS work better here? I’m okay with daily, but hourly would be better. Microsoft best practices? Not opposed to 3rd party software, but would prefer a free Microsoft option if available (limited resources).

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Tldr, sync 2 identical 2019 standard servers with 4 hyper vms for disaster recovery using robocopy, DFS to something else to sync data regularly.

Answer 1

Hello

Thank you for your question and reaching out. I can understand you are having query\issues related to Replication.

You can setup Hyper-V replication to different location if you have enough storage and Hyper-V resources.

Hyper-V Replica is an integral part of the Hyper-V role. It contributes to your disaster recovery strategy by replicating virtual machines from one Hyper-V host server to another to keep your workloads available. Hyper-V Replica creates a copy of a live virtual machine to a replica offline virtual machine

For Fileserver you can use Robocopy to Sync the changes.

Reference :

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualization/hyper-v/manage/set-up-hyper-v-replica

--If the reply is helpful, please Upvote and Accept as answer--

Answer 2

Double post