A recent conversation with a hosting provider using Hyper-V Replica brought an interesting question to the fore. The hosting provider’s services were aimed primarily towards Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs), with one service being DR-as-a-Service. A...

Customers asked us if they can have a monitoring mechanism for Hyper-v Replica in a rainy day scenario. With System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1, customers can now monitor Hyper-V Replica using a Management Pack available for free from the catalogue...

Many VMworld 2013 attendees looked at Hyper-V a long time ago, and haven’t kept up with the progress our platform has made in recent years. If you count yourself among this group, we at Microsoft would love to show you how far we’ve come....

Hyper-V Replica provides three methods to do initial replication: Send data over the network (Online IR) Send data using external media (OOB IR) Use an existing virtual machine as the initial copy Each option for initial replication has a specific scenario...

VMworld is in full swing and Microsoft is there to actively participate. One obvious question that VMworld attendees (and IT professionals that are familiar with VMware) are probably asking right now – “why would I want to learn about Hyper...

Join our next Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) Jump Start free online training event on August 1, featuring Microsoft’s Jeffrey Snover , Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect for the Windows Server division and inventor of PowerShell, together...

This post is a part of the nine-part “ What’s New in Windows Server & System Center 2012 R2 ” series that is featured on Brad Anderson’s In the Cloud blog. Today’s blog post covers Linux Support on Windows Server 2012...

In our recent conversation with customers about Hyper-V Replica, the questions that came up from a few customers was – Is there a way to perform the Initial Replication (IR) for VMs without stressing our organizations internet bandwidth? ...

SMB is getting a lot of attention with Windows Server 2012, and we’ve had questions from a few customers regarding the inter-play between SMB shares and Hyper-V Replica. In this post we’ll share our experience around setting up and using various configurations...

MMS 2013 Hands On Labs Virtualization Nation, A few weeks ago we held the annual 2013 Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas. As in years past, the event sold out quickly and it was a very busy week. To everyone that attended, our sincere thanks...

We are excited to see the release of XenDesktop 7 and support our partner Citrix. XenDesktop 7 brings together both XenApp and XenDesktop functionality into a common release and now brings support for Windows Server 2012. XenDesktop can easily be deployed...

Customers have frequently asked us for capacity planning guidance before deploying Hyper-V Replica – e.g.: “How much network bandwidth is required between the primary and replica site”, “How much storage is required on the primary and replica site”, ...

What is resynchronization and why is it needed? Hyper-V Replica provides protection to VMs by tracking and replicating changes to the virtual hard disks (VHDs) of the VM. Hyper-V Replica runs 24 hours, 365 days in a year; for any VM that has been enabled...

We’ve been talking to a lot of people about deploying integration services (integration components) lately. As it turns out, they’re pretty easy to patch offline with existing Hyper-V tools. First, why would you update integration services...

A new article has appeared on the TechNet Wiki that provides a complete list of updates for Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/15576.hyper-v-update-list-for-windows-server-2012.aspx I am really...

We have had a number of queries on how to enable replication using certificates created from makecert. Though the Understanding and Troubleshooting guide for Hyper-V Replica discusses this aspect, I am posting a separate article on this. The below steps...

In a mixed language environment where the server name or domain name contains international characters, you might encounter an error at the time of enabling replication. The event viewer messages will tell you that “Hyper-V failed to enable replication...

Windows Server 2012 introduces fundamental improvements that make it a cloud-ready operating system. The capabilities provide a flexible and scalable solution which opens up a wide range of opportunities for hosting providers to build new cloud services...

As part of setting up a replication relationship, Hyper-V Replica transfers the initial VHDs over the network – depending on the size of the VHD, this operation can be time consuming and also impacts your production network. Once initial replication is...

System Center 2012 Orchestrator provides a powerful workflow management solution which allows IT administrators to automate different tasks exposed by the platform. At the heart of the Orchestrator is a set of Runbooks which outline the sequence of activities...

David is one of our Premier Field Engineers and he approached us with an interesting problem where the customer was encountering a Kerberos error when trying to create a replication relationship. On first glance, the setup looked very straight forward...

Windows Server 2012 is generally available for evaluation and purchase by all customers around the world. Additionally, there is great news for organizations that are looking for a way to migrate virtual machines hosted on VMware vSphere to the Hyper...

Hey, it's Lalithra again. In the last part , we talked about what resource metering is. Now, we’ll get into how to use it with PowerShell. A quick note: if this is your first foray into PowerShell, here are some resources you may find helpful...

Hi, I’m Lalithra Fernando, a program manager on the Hyper-V team, working in various areas including clustering and authorization, as well as with our Hyper-V MVPs. In this post, I’ll be talking about resource metering, a new feature in Hyper...

We have seen multiple queries on the steps required to create the Hyper-V Replica Broker using Powershell, a previous post describes the process but adding more details on the end to end workflow. To create a Hyper-V Replica Broker in a DHCP environment...