Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Includes Replicas

The third version of Hyper-V, which shipped with Windows Server 2012, includes a new feature for replicating virtual machines (VMs) for disaster recovery, as well as improvements to VM importing and PowerShell administration. These and other improvements, such as Hyper-V’s support for virtual networks, extending the virtual switch, and enabling file shares to store a VM’s hard drives, make Hyper-V more competitive for virtualizing server application and desktop virtualization workloads. To benefit from replication, administrators must understand its capabilities, carefully plan the deployment and ongoing administration, and use the features in compliance with all applicable license-usage rights.

Hyper-V Replica Aids Disaster Recovery

Hyper-V Replica is a new feature of Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 that provides a hardware-, storage-, and workload-agnostic solution for disaster recovery of VMs. Disaster recovery solutions prepare an organization’s vital technology infrastructure to ensure that critical services are quickly restored following natural disasters (such as hurricanes or floods) or man-made disasters (such as fires or power failures). Hyper-V Replica copies changes made to a VM disk at a primary site asynchronously across a wide area network and applies them to the disk of a VM at a replica site. If a disaster brings down the VM at the primary site, the VM at the replica site can be brought up quickly to provide business continuity. For disaster recovery, Hyper-V offers new deployment and management advantages over VM recovery technologies that Microsoft has offered to date.