HyperV Replica type with automatic failover?

[BearGoat]

Hi Everyone

 

I'm in the process of virtualizating our servers - starting with a migration to Exchange 2010 from 2003.

 

I've purchased two HP DL385 Servers with RAM and disk space to boot.

 

I've been planning to use HyperV replica to provide disaster recovery from one server to another. However, there were concerns about the lack of automatic failover with this.

 

I was looking at using HyperV clustering with failover, however we don't have a SAN or any shared storage.

 

Could we use cluster shared volumes, using the local hard disks on each server? I looked at the Hyper over SMB video presentation Microsoft did and they suggested using that in the absense of shared storage - has anyone ever tried this?

 

 

Thanks in advance

Jon

[midweek]

Hi

 

I actually set up a very basic test network with two clustered hypervisors with a third server running Server 2012 as the storage and managed to produce a highly available setup with the VMs on SMB shares.

It was really easy and failover was almost instant (drops one or two packets if you ping the VM and fail a hypervisor). No idea how it would work in a production environment though.

 

Also found this today which might be closer to what you are after:

 

How to Use Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Replica for Disaster Recovery

[BearGoat]

Thanks midweek,

 

I've also discovered this too:

 

Automated Disaster Recovery with Hyper-V Replica and PowerShell 3.0 for FREE! - IT Pros ROCK! at Microsoft - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

 

From what I can gather, a powershell script checks to see if the orginal VM is up, if it is not then another script kicks in the secondary VM.