Hyper-V > DC > Replication Errors

[Koldov]

OK, next 'adventure' on my Hyper-V 'voyage of discovery'...

 

I made some changes to my VM DC yesterday which required some downtime. I moved to a fixed disk which somehow just created a new disk, so then reattached to the new disk and shrunk it (as it was configured with defaults of 127GB) .

 

This has resulted in it somehow being out of sync with the main DC and so it has stopped replicating due to a USN rollback (main DC is refusing it) and I've come in today to lots of errors...

 

I've followed the MS article which basically seems to suggest this will happen a lot with a VM DC, (if creating and restoring from a snapshot, alternative version, or backup without 'system state') and details a scorched earth policy of completely demoting and clearing up metadata. Now I've promoted it again and everything appears OK for now...

 

What does everyone do to stop this sort of thing happening?

 

Is there any point in snapshot/checkpoint for these servers within Hyper-V (hopefully with more than one DC it would never really need to be restored as I could trash it, start again and let it replicate from a good one but that isn't a good DR policy)?

 

Is there a 'free' backup solution that is both VM and DC aware ....?