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Hi Everybody,

Could we replicate hyper V on Two hyper V server from Shared SAN storage.

We want to have SAN storage to be the location for two Hyper V server virtual machine hard disk

We want to replicate the hyper V server to another one in case of physical failure of one of servers

the hyper V server will host Primary and secondary domain Controller + WSUS virtual machines

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4 Spice ups
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Can you be more detailed with your current config and the desired config you are wanting to deploy?

Replication is not backup. You must have a backup solution for your virtual environment as well.

Production environment should replicate to a separate physical location where your DR environment is.

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Firstly, you don;t replicate DCs, just have one either side.

Second of all, WSUS is hardly critical and it’s also now no longer being developed.

Your fall back to patching is the internet and your secondary DC should be on another site, elsewhere. Add a 3rd if you’re worried.

You realise, that although you can replicate and have two servers run the VMs, if your storage is down, none of the VMs will run.

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If your Hyper-V hosts are using the same SAN shared storage for the VM’s you don’t need to configure any replication. Instead you need to ensure that your Hyper-V hosts are in a cluster. This will allow you to manage where to run the VM compute in case of a failure. I believe the default is to automatically migrate VM’s from a failed cluster host to a running host, so this should basically just work.

As others have said though, you should have at least two DC’s. You should not rely on Hyper-V Cluster failover for DC services…Domain Controllers have their own HA failover built in. Also, you should definitely have real backups in addition to all of this.

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So, if the two hyper V host share the only the VM partition which will be in D partition which will be configured in SAN storage, can i make a cluster for them. please note that the two hyper V will have only two hard disks configured as RAID 1 on each server for operating system and Virtual machine storage will be configured on the shared SAN storage connected through Cisco swicthes for both of them .

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I have added a simple drawing for more clarification for the desired connection

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In general terms, yes. There’ is some configuration to make it work though. You might start with this article:

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There are a few terms I hope not to get wrong…

  1. Are the servers running hyper-v server or server 20xx with hyper-v role ?

  2. When you said “make a cluster” what do you actually mean ?

  • cluster is a collective term for computers
  • clustering is making HA or FT for server OS and/or DBs (like SQL clustering)
  1. Are you using the SAN as if it is a Direct attached storage ?
  • usually we “connect” the SAN to 2 or more hosts using probably iSCSI such that the hosts “see” the same datastore
  • we can also split the SAN into 2 or more LUNs (or volumes) such that each host see only 1 “connected” LUNs, as if more HDD/SSDs were directly plugged into the physical machine
    Therefore, depending on what OP means by “connected” or “shared SAN storage”, it is rather a guessing game on what it means to have Hyper-v Replication and Failover “on SAN” ?

I would assume that OP means to replicate VMs and not “replicate hyper-v server” ??

Then replication & failover of VMs also depends on what the VMs are running. We will/should NEVER recommend replication of VMs running as Domain Controllers and/or Database Servers.

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Then, how to achieve hardware redundancy in case any of the Hyper V servers has physical damage. This is a DMZ network hosts Domain controllers and Trellix ePO

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Why are Trellix and your DCs in a DMZ?

If your goal is to protect against hardware failure at the server level only, there are a number of ways to do this, but if your storage is down, so are all your VMs.

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When using mass storage servers with hyper-v I have historically just used iSCSI connections.

They have worked well for me.

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Firstly…are you using Hyper-v server or server 20xx with hyper-v role ??
Then how are you using the SAN for the 2 hosts ?

What do you mean by DMZ network that hosts DCs and your “trellix” VMs ?

What if your “hardware failures” include mobo issues or NC issues ?

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OP, Hyper-V has supported HA clusters of hosts since the initial release of Hyper-V in 2008. With Hyper-V 2008 R2, Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) was introduced where multiple hosts could run VMs from the same storage device (LUN). This requires shared storage, but does not involve replication, which is a separate technology and is unneeded when you have a SAN.

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Can edcuate me a little as I am more towards a VMware user so I only know about server 20xx with hyper-v roles from my staff (mostly labs).

What if there are literally “diskless” server 20xx with hyper-v roles such that the host only have c:\ for the host OS and all other data stores are iSCSI drives of a SAN such that 2 or 3 hosts share the same SAN.

Would “hyper-v replicatio” of VMs still be useful ?
Would the replica be affected if the host suddenly dies (eg from hardware failure) while the hyper-v replication is in process ?

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Yes, I reached the same conclusion for this. I will configure shared storage for both Hyper-V host VMs on SAN storage for high availability. in case of one Hyper V host fail , the other one still running and can managed the virtual machines

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yes, I reached to a conclusion that if one Hyper V host fail the other one still there and Virtual machine is running to manage the VM so I think hyper V clustering would be more appropriate as i have Domain Controller and Trellix centralized solution and PI server

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i think hyper V Host Clustering is enough in my case

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If your Hyper-V host is literally diskless, then you’re doing boot to SAN. Otherwise you would have a SATA DOM, or a single boot drive, or local RAID, or Dell BOSS for booting. If running Core with Hyper-V role (or Hyper-V Server), you only need like 50 GB boot storage.

Then, when you add SAN storage in a cluster, the SAN volumes would be converted to clustered shared volume (CSV), which gets mounted under c:\ClusterStorage on each host.