Yesterday I posted about my new home setup, which makes heavy use of Hyper-V Replica.

When you first setup Hyper-V Replica for a virtual machine – we copy the virtual machine configuration and storage from the primary server to the replica server. From that point on we replicate any new data that is written to the virtual machine storage – but we do not replicate any new changes to the virtual machine configuration.

Why?

Well – there are two reasons for this:

  1. We have many deployments where the Hyper-V administrator on the primary and replica servers are different people (e.g. a small business replicating to a local service provider). In this case the administrator on the replica server is not going to want the administrator on the primary server to be able to make arbitrary configuration changes.
  2. There are a number of configuration changes where you want things to be different. E.g. you may want the virtual machine on the replica server to be connected to a different network or to have a different amount of memory, etc…

While this all makes sense, it has tripped me up a number of times. The scenario I have experienced is this:

  1. Enable Hyper-V Replica on a virtual machine
    … months pass …
  2. Make a configuration change to the virtual machine, forgetting that it is configured for replica
    … months pass…
  3. Perform a planned failover of the virtual machine for some reason, and wonder why all the settings are wrong!

After having this happen to me a couple of times – I have taken to using PowerShell to perform quick sanity checks on my virtual machine configurations. This is actually quite easy to do – as PowerShell allows you to target multiple physical computers with one command.

Some checks that I have done include:

Checking memory configurations:

This command will get all the details of the memory configuration from two servers:

get-vm -computername Hyper-V-1, Hyper-V-2 | select name, DynamicMemoryEnabled, MemoryStartup, MemoryMinimum, MemoryMaximum | Sort-Object name | ft

Which looks like this when it is run:

clip_image001

Checking startup delay:

This command shows you all the startup information:

get-vm -computername Hyper-V-1, Hyper-V-2 | select name,automaticstartaction, automaticstartdelay | Sort-Object automaticstartdelay, name

clip_image002

Checking MAC address configuration:

I use DHCP with MAC address reservations in my house, so it is critical that virtual machines not change their MAC address. This command shows you what MAC addresses are being used, and whether dynamic mac address generation is enabled or not:

get-vm -computername Hyper-V-1, Hyper-V-2 | Get-VMNetworkAdapter | select VMName, macaddress, DynamicMacAddressEnabled | sort-object VMName, macaddress

clip_image003

Cheers,
Ben