Monday, May 11, 2015

Hyper-V DR build out

So we are getting ready to ramp up our disaster recover build out. We have recently completed a SAN migration and have now begun the process of building out our DR capabilities. The question came up as to how we would facilitate a failover of the VMs. To give a little background. We have an EMC VNX 2 in our primary data center and we are in the process of moving our old VNX to our DR site.  We will be replicating between the sites using recover point. 

After kicking around some ideas of how we could use these existing tools and the capabilities of Hyper-V I think I have come to a solution.  Since all of the VHD files we be replicating to our DR site and we will have some hosts thee on standby I though couldn't I just script the import of the vms through PowerShell. This would allow me to take the vms as they stood in production and bring them online at DR in the event of a disaster.  So as long as the primary site is offline the servers could come up and run at the DR site.  To make this easier we can extend the network to the DR site so the ips would not need to change and this would make the transition quicker.  

So then I thought how do we fail back. So in theory the vms will be replicating back to the primary site when it becomes available.  All of the files will become current on production.  At this point if I shut down all of the vms running at DR,allow the replication to complete, and then turn them back on at the primary site they should pickup right where they left off at DR.  

In theory it should work. So we are putting together a test to prove everything out.  As we work through it I will be looking for places to automate parts of the failover. Probably using some orchestrator run books or trying some things with Azure. I will keep track of  our progress here and document this out as we go.  I am open to feed back if anyone has any ideas or has already been through this. I am sure there are other solutions using addition technology but this is what I have to work with, and make it work I will.

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